The problem
Sometimes your best sounds are the ones you can't find.
Sound designers search by feel. The thing in your head has a texture and a weight. None of that fits in a keyword box. So you guess at words and phrases and hope whoever tagged the library guessed the same ones.
Sound design is translation. What else sounds like this? Cornflakes become footsteps in snow. Snapped celery becomes a breaking bone. The work happens in the ear, not the keyword.
Gary Rydstrom built a career on that idea. The liquid metal sound of the Terminator was revealed to him in his kitchen while feeding his dog.
The right sound was never the obvious one, and it was rarely the one you could find by name.
Haystack searches the way you listen.
What it is
A different way to search.
Haystack takes your description and matches it to the DNA of your sounds. It searches the genetics, the fingerprint. Filenames and metadata are irrelevant. You describe what you are chasing in plain language and it surfaces the matches, the needles in the haystack, the ones you forgot you owned or would never have thought of.
- Search by texture, material, motion, and mood.
- Click "similar" to surface more sounds like the one you want.
- Drag / Drop audio directly to find more just like it.
- Record audio or your voice directly into Haystack to find matches.
- Surface the needles in the Haystack.
- Runs on your own machine, against your own libraries.
It doesn't replace your main database search tool.
It's the tool you reach for when keywords stop helping.
Built to be owned. One-time purchase. No subscription.