Behind Sift / 4 min read
We missed the digging. So we built Sift.
We’re developers and musicians. We want to get lost in records, hear something unexpected, and remember the bit that made us stop. Samplette’s ads and push toward paid features wore us down. It started to feel greedy, and we stopped enjoying the experience. So we started building Sift.
The best part is the bit you weren’t looking for.
A loose drum intro. A bass line that takes a strange turn. A voice coming through a noisy recording. Digging works because you don’t know exactly what you’ll find. You follow your ears, skip a few records, then suddenly stay for the whole thing.
That’s the experience we wanted to protect. For us, the ads and upsells on Samplette had become too much. It felt like the music was getting squeezed out by monetization. As developers, we could build something. As musicians, we knew the kind of session we wanted it to support.
Sift grew out of that overlap. Open it, listen, save a find, leave a note, keep going. The tool should make those small actions easy enough that you can stay with the music.
A favorite is only half the memory.
Saving a track helps. Remembering why you saved it helps more. A title in a long list doesn’t tell you whether you loved the opening drums, a chord change halfway through, or the texture of the whole record.
In Sift, you can mark a timestamp and write down what you heard. Give a find a tag. Put it in a collection for the idea you’re working on. When you return, the source and the moment are still connected.
We also wanted a queue we could shape ourselves. Put a record next, move a few around, or let discovery continue. Some sessions need a direction; others need a little room to wander.
Your listening notes should be easy to take with you.
Sift’s library lives in your browser on your device. You can start digging without an account, and saving tracks and notes doesn’t require a subscription. JSON exports carry your library into another Sift session; CSV gives you a readable list to work with elsewhere.
Local storage also means you need a backup. Clearing browser data can remove a library, and signing in does not currently sync it between devices. We would rather make that clear than have you discover it after a good session.
The export contains your references and notes, not audio. Playback stays in the YouTube player, and a source can still disappear or become unavailable.
A tool we want open when we’re making music.
Sift is a maintained selection of recordings, with filters for the metadata we have and room for your own YouTube links. It isn’t a search engine for all of YouTube. We don’t guess a missing release year just to fill a field.
There’s plenty of room to grow. What matters to us is keeping the foundation useful: discovery, a manageable queue, notes that bring you back to an idea, and a library you can export.
If Samplette’s ads and upsells left you looking for something else too, our Samplette alternative page walks through the differences. Or just open Sift and see where your ears take you.