a command-line companion for rediscovering your own sound.
spelunker is a creative terminal tool for revisiting old recordings —
a playful journey through forgotten experiments, half-finished tracks, and accidental magic buried in hard drives.
It turns the act of sorting through audio into a creative ritual:
equal parts exploration, journaling, and nostalgia.
The goal isn’t to organize or tidy up.
It’s to feel inspired again — to wander through your own sonic caverns.
- Playfulness over productivity. This isn’t a database tool; it’s a communicative, creative companion.
- Focus and solitude. Just you, a terminal, a keyboard, and your sounds.
- Discovery through constraint. Filenames are hidden behind a confetti of characters so you can listen without preconceptions.
- Personal reflection. You react in real time — capturing scores, impressions, and stray thoughts in a stream of consciousness, forming a living diary of your sonic past.
- Creative reuse. Every time you move forward, the tool quietly leaves a trail of symbolic links — a spelunked folder you can open later in Ableton or any DAW.
A library of libraries of libraries.
You begin inside a folder — maybe your Audio Archive, maybe an old backup drive. From that starting point, the tool invites you to decide where to go next.
Include this one?
(y) yes — include everything
(n) no — skip it entirely
(d) dive deeper and decide at the next level
(b) back — return to parent folder
(i) include loose audio files in this folder (when audio files are present)
You walk through your structure like choosing which caves to enter.
A progress counter shows how much of the terrain you’ve mapped.
When finished, you’ve defined the regions of your sonic world to explore.
Once your map is set, Spelunker scans those chosen areas — counting, classifying, and summarizing every sound it finds.
You’ve unearthed 1,372 artifacts —
6.2 hours of audio across 9 formats.
The shortest is 0.2 seconds; the longest, 3 hours.
Quite the treasure trove.
This is your expedition briefing — a glimpse of the landscape ahead.
Now the real descent begins.
You enter a terminal interface that feels part hacker’s den, part diary.
No windows, no waveforms, no filenames — just a dark screen, faint motion, and sound.
Each piece plays anonymously, stripped of context.
You listen. That’s it.
Your keyboard becomes your instrument for navigation and response.
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
| Space | Play / Pause |
| qwertyuiop | Jump to time segments (sonar pings into the file) |
| asdfghjkl;' | Express your feeling (0–10 vibe score) |
| ↑ / ↓ | Switch between scoring and jotting notes |
| Enter | Save impressions and move to the next sound |
| n | Reveal or hide the true filename |
| m | Choose chaos or intention (random vs next on list) |
| [ / ] | Step backward / forward |
Note: When you encounter a file you've already rated, the interface displays your previous score and notes, allowing you to update them.
Each decision — every score and passing thought — is saved automatically.
As you go, Spelunker quietly builds a spelunked/ folder beside you:
a living map of everything you’ve touched.
A subtle counter keeps time.
0.14% spelunked…
After a handful of files — sometimes ten, sometimes fewer or more —
the interface speaks back in small poetic gestures.
Another 10 sounds explored.
28 minutes of memory uncovered.
You’re now 12% through your journey.
The commentary is light, meditative — a reminder you’re progressing through a personal landscape.
No special command to export.
Every file you rate is instantly mapped in your spelunked/ directory as a symbolic link —
renamed with creative hints drawn from your notes and vibe scores.
8___warm-hollow-rhythm__drum_take_4.wav
You can drop this folder straight into Ableton Live or any DAW,
transforming your exploration into material for new work.
And whenever you relaunch spelunker from the same place,
it remembers where you left off — ready to keep digging.
Note on data safety: Spelunker saves your work continuously in a data/ folder. Keep your own backups of this folder (via git, Time Machine, cloud storage, etc.) — spelunker doesn't manage backups for you.
Reaching 100%: When you've rated every file in your collection, spelunker celebrates your completion. Press any key to exit, or press Space to continue exploring—you can revisit and re-score files, or simply wander through your sonic archive again.
Spelunker should feel like:
- Walking through an old tape archive with a flashlight.
- Meditative, not mechanical — small choices, one sound at a time.
- Occasionally surprising — when an old riff or fragment surfaces from the dark.
- Empowering — you emerge with a curated set of fragments and a renewed connection to your past work.
It’s as much about listening to yourself as to your recordings.
| Stage/Activity | What You're Doing | What It Feels Like |
|---|---|---|
| select | Choosing which folders to include | Mapping your caves |
| catalog | Scanning and summarizing finds | Your expedition overview |
| reflect | Playing, scoring, and journaling | Intimate, reflective listening |
| (continuous mapping) | Built automatically as you reflect | A set of symbolic links to remember your journey |
At the end of a spelunking journey, you have:
- A personal log of your rediscoveries and impressions
- A directory of ready-to-use sonic artifacts
- A deeper, more playful connection to your creative past
It’s both an archive and an instrument —
a hybrid between diary and sampler.
Reflecting is an act of creative archaeology.
It’s for artists who keep everything, yet rarely look back —
who suspect that within their noise, something still shimmers.
This tool turns that suspicion into a practice:
gentle, deliberate, and open-ended.