Sononym

Sononym is a standalone sample browser for macOS, Windows, and Linux that indexes your sample libraries and lets you search them by acoustic similarity rather than filename or folder structure. The core feature is Similarity Search: you drop any audio file, or record live audio directly into the app, and Sononym scans your collection across multiple perceptual dimensions including overall character, spectral content, timbre, pitch, and amplitude, then ranks results by how closely they match. Version 1.6 rebuilt the database engine from scratch, cutting indexing time to roughly one-fifth of what it was in 1.5, with similarity searches now running up to 20x faster on large libraries.

New in 1.6: waveform zooming, pitch control with pitch lock, continuous playback with a configurable trigger point, and MIDI triggering so you can fire samples from a controller while browsing. Duplicate detection runs across your entire library and flags redundant files. Sononym does not function as a DAW plugin or sample server; it operates as a standalone browser with drag-and-drop output to your DAW. It sells direct from the developer’s website and is not available through Plugin Boutique.