Best AI Sample Finder: Output Co-Producer Vs Splice Bridge
- Ezra Sandzer-Bell
- 4 days ago
- 7 min read
Updated: 3 days ago
Output is a popular DAW plugin developer that serves bedroom music producers and hitmakers alike. They launched in 2013 and have been shipping blockbusting VSTs, like Arcade and Portal, ever since.
Their latest release, Output Co-Producer, is an AI sample finder that loads directly in your DAW. It analyzes four and eight bar sample areas on any audio timeline and attempts to match reference audio with clips from their own marketplace.
The Output's Co-Producer beta launched In December 2023. It was embraced by the producer community on principle, as a refreshing take on artificial intelligence. I've mostly seen positive feedback from YouTube and socials.
People's love for Co-Producer is fueled by a distaste for generative AI music companies training their models on artist work without permission.
Output has created an ethical tool that retrieves similar samples from their own licensed library, requiring fewer steps from the user and saving time usually spent digging for royalty-free samples in packs or sample marketplaces.
We spoke with their team's senior director of research and development to learn more out what's happening under the hood with this app. They seem to have both an LLM (text prompt interpreter) and audio-matching algorithms in place.
In this article we'll walk you through the new Co-Producer AI sample finder, and share some honest critiques around quality and app performance. We'll compare it to three other key products in this space; Splice, Jamahook and Loopcloud.
Table of Contents
AI Sample Finder: The basics of Output Co-Producer
Output's product line is made up of user interfaces that act as entry points into their sample marketplace. They excel at top-tier user experience in the DAW.
Co-producer represents the company's efforts to continue growing and expanding into the future, harnessing aspects of audio machine learning that help artists instead of exploiting them.
The new app looks sleek, with minimal interface design and very few barriers to getting started. Check out the tutorial below for instructions on how it works:
How to use and access Output in your DAW
Visit the Co-producer website. Output currently offers a free 7-day trial. That's what I personally used to get started.
Scan for new plugins in your DAW and then load Co-Producer on the master track. To record all of the tracks at once, press “Capture Audio” and press play to start analyzing your music. Here's how to do that in Logic Pro, for example:
Within seconds, Output's AI sample finder will scan the harmonic, rhythmic, and timbral characteristics of your DAW project. It takes a moment to query the server and retrieve matching samples.
Before recording your loop in Co-Producer, you'll be asked whether you're scanning a four or eight bar segment. BPM is conveniently and automatically detected, but you'll need to specify the key signature of your loop, in order to filter the results according to Output's metadata.
When you leave the text area blank, Co-producer browses its library and matches samples without any guidance. If you're not getting something that's in the ballpark of what you wanted, take the reins; prompt for instruments, genre and vibe to get more specific results.
For instance, let's imagine you've got some smooth neo-soul type chords with a drum beat and bass track accompaniment. Enter prompts like "soulful guitar lead" or "soft synth pad" in the search bar to get samples in that vein.
How the AI Sample Finder algorithm works
We were fortunate to speak with Spencer Salazar, Senior Director of R&D at Output, who explained that Co-Producer's AI is running deep audio learning algorithms alongside an advanced LLM (large language model).
The "search by audio" feature performs a comprehensive harmonic, rhythmic, and timbral analysis. It tries to quickly located samples that complement the existing audio, rather than merely replicating it.
Users can guide Co-Producer’s sample finder either through audio alone or combined with text prompts, ensuring optimal sample integration.
Additionally, the plugin's “similar sounds” feature offers variations of selected samples, enhancing the flexibility and precision of your music production workflow.
This description sounds promising and inspired our team to get in there to experiment with a variety of BPMs, keys, genres, and degrees of musical complexity.
Co-Producer would benefit from higher quality samples
I've experimented with Output's Arcade plugin at length. My guitarist friend and I even co-released a track on streaming platforms featuring vocal chops from one of their libraries.
So to be fair, I went into the new product with high expectation. This was their "coming out of beta" moment. But what I encountered was a combination of bugs, an annoying UX issue and audio quality problems that caught me off guard.
On the topic of saving time: Co-producer seems to currently have an intermittent server error bug. It goes like this; you wait about ~10 seconds for a simple text prompt and 4-bar audio clip to process. Then the plugin returns an error message stating that no samples could be found. Resubmitting the same request a second time, without any changes, will fix the issue every time.
This bug occurred somewhat frequently, around 5-10 times per hour.
There's a second issue in the plugin that I'd describe more as a "UX bug", meaning it interrupts what could otherwise be a seamless user experience.
Users can't click to select a row from the sample list. They must press the play button first. Then you can toggle back over to the DAW timeline and press play a second time, to hear the sample restart in sync with your project.
This tiny back and forth process can feel tedious when you're testing 30+ sounds in a row. A shortcut would have been helpful.
But my gripe with Co-Producer isn't really about the the server errors and sync playback difficulties. My disappointment was ultimately with the quality of the music samples in the collection.
The low quality of Co-Producer's music samples may eventually be an Achilles heel for the company, if they don't invest more seriously in high quality music. As one person stated, the sample library sounds a bit "samesy".
The music clips sound like they were created in bulk. I can easily imagine the contracted musicians rushing to produce a large volume quantity of loops by an incoming deadline. Most of what I heard in my few hours of testing were generic synth timbres and clunky, super-quantized EDM concepts.
This quality issue makes it difficult for me to evaluate whether the AI sample finder algorithm is dysfunctional or simply lacking in high quality music to train on.
Splice AI sample finder offers "search with sound"
People have compared Output Co-Producer to AI sound matching software like Jamahook and Loopcloud. Each company uses artificial intelligence to "listen" to your loops.
Splice is my favorite of all the products. They've got a prototype in Studio One called Search With Sound. Users drag audio files from a local folder into the VST.
It's not as convenient as Output's plugin, because you've got to bounce your loop from the DAW and then import it back into Splice. But once you've done that, the similar sounds algorithm works beautifully. The samples are very high quality too.
Splice users can be found across all the DAWs; Ableton, Logic Pro, FL Studio, and Pro Tools. But the current search with sound feature is available exclusively on Studio One. That's a major limitation that I hope they overcome in the DAW Bridge VST before end of year.
The universal Splice standalone app has its own AI sample finder called "similar search". It's a baseline you can used to analyze tracks from their marketplace, but you can't upload your own files to the standalone app yet.
Good news though. The Splice DAW bridge plugin syncs with your daw project in a single click, unlike the two-click workflow in Output's Co-producer.
Splice offers additional benefits like the option to apply half-time or double-time samples. It will keep your DAW project BPM the same while you pitch shift the samples using their controls.
By comparison, Co-Producer also offers a "show similar samples" feature, but it defaults to suggesting files from the same sample pack line in Output's collection.
See the screenshot below to understand what I mean. You can see that six of the eight recommended "similar samples" are pulled from a single collection, despite having very different tempos and sounding fairly different from one another.
In my experience testing the plugin, the "similar samples" rarely aligned with pitch and rhythms of my reference files. This lazy-recommendation system once again made me question how intelligent the audio matching model really is.
I think Co-Producer needs to commission a new and elite level audio for their library, if they're going to stay in the race.
Splice has a much more diverse collection of music, with better audio fidelity and more thoughtful compositions. As an outsider, it seems like having a high quality library makes their AI similar search engine work more effectively. Or maybe their audio similarity tech is more sophisticated than Output's.
Final takeaways on Co-producer vs Splice: Which one's the best AI sample finder?
To Co producer's credit, the product looks great and works well enough. The BPM auto-detection from the DAW is a nice touch. Recording audio straight from the DAW timeline is a big win. That's something that Splice cannot do currently.
These upsides don't make up for the low quality samples in Output's collection. I spent just as much time scrolling and testing as I would using any other royalty free sample library, hunting for a sound that I'd actually want to use.
Over the years, Splice has done a better job with quality control and now it's paying off. I would say that they have the superior product. If they publish a "co-producer style" plugin later this year, things are certainly going to heat up.