July 30 2010 Press Release

CPU Productions, a technology company based in Santa Barbara California, today announced the release of Groove Detective, a revolutionary new tool for searching in very large collections of drum and percussion loops.

As producers’ and musicians’ collection of audio loops used in music productions of all stripes grows steadily year by year, so does the accompanying problem of finding exactly what you need, when you need it. Even though individual collections may be sensibly organized into styles, tempo and so on, there is no agreed-upon system for doing this and rarely does a user take the time and effort to consolidate all these disparate libraries. The result is that the collection is spread over a large number of folders, making it exceedingly difficult and time consuming to audition potential candidates when it matters the most: at the moment of inspiration and creation.

Groove Detective solves this problem once and for all. By analyzing all the loops the user has and consolidating all the data in a single searchable database, it no longer matters where the loop is stored. The information in the database allows the user to search for loops based on the pattern of drum hits in the loop itself, not on how it is named or in which folder it resides. The search pattern can be made as narrowly specific or as widely fuzzy as one wish, depending on the need of the moment. There is also an option of including a “sounds like” dimension to a search. For example, if one is looking for loops that have a particular snare drum sound, one need only provide that sound to the search engine and the degree to which the sound should match.

In the result browser one can further refine the search by filtering on tempo, ‘pitched-ness’, file type, sample rate and so on. Once a choice has been made, the loop can simply be dragged into a track in the DAW production software (if it is so enabled), without ever having to enter any file open or import dialog.

This technology is based on over a decade of research in audio analysis and Music Information Retrieval (MIR) systems.