Building a B2B API for audio + text-to-timbre search — would this be useful in your plugin or sample platform?

[yannick-impulsia]

Hi everyone,

I'm Yannick, co-founder of Impulsia (impulsia.ai). We've been quietly working on something for a while and we'd rather get honest feedback from this community now than ship into the void in six months.

The problem I keep hearing

Producers, sound designers and even pros tell me they spend 20–30% of their session time scrolling through preset banks and sample libraries. The current search experience is mostly tag-based (genre, mood, instrument) — which barely captures what people actually want, which is *timbre*. "Bright analog pad", "gritty Rhodes", "airy female chop" — none of those map cleanly to existing taxonomies.

What we built

A B2B API (codename: Granulator) that ingests any audio collection — samples, presets, loops, stems — and lets you query it two ways:

- Audio-to-timbre: upload a sound, get the closest timbral matches
- Mix-to-timbre: upload a mix of instruments, get the closest timbral matches for each instrument
- Text-to-timbre: natural language queries like "swelling cinema brass pad" or "lofi tape-saturated Wurlitzer"

Under the hood are deep neural audio models, trained on synth/sample audio data rather than generic music. The idea is that a plugin maker, a sample marketplace, or a preset-bank author could plug this in and offer real timbre-aware search inside their own product, without having to build the ML themselves.

What I genuinely want to know from you

1. If you're a plugin developer or run a sample/preset platform: would this solve a real problem, or are you already happy with what you've built?
2. What would make you actually integrate something like this — pricing model, on-prem option, custom-trained embeddings on your own catalog, latency requirements?
3. What would be a deal-breaker — data ownership, embedding portability, vendor lock-in?
4. Have you seen similar tools in the wild? I'd love to understand who else is in this space.

No pitch, no demo link being pushed — happy to share more privately if anyone's curious, but mostly I just want the unfiltered take from the people who'd actually use this. Reply here or DM me, whichever's easier.

Thanks,
— Yannick
impulsia.ai