I was bothered by the fact I’d find great unfinished FL Studio project files buried under a huge mess. With project names like these, who needs enemies, right?
I thought an external program would be useful here. After a months long back-and-forth with Claude, that experiment has grown into a proper program: The Song Is: a visual project browser for FL Studio and Ableton Live producers.
What it does
You point it at your projects folder once on startup. It scans everything and displays each project as a draggable card on a freeform canvas, like a pin-up board for your DAW files. Each card shows the project name and last-modified date, and you can add:
- A star rating
- A colour tag
- Written notes
- Sticky notes anywhere on the canvas
Cards are freely draggable, so you can arrange your projects however makes sense to you. You can search, zoom in and out, hide projects you’re done with, and export your entire metadata as a JSON backup at any time.
And probably the key feature, clicking “Open” on a project opens it in your DAW.
It works with both FL Studio (.flp) and Ableton Live (.als) projects.
Privacy
The app runs entirely on your machine. No account and no internet connection is required.
Download
Head to thesong.is, subscribe to the newsletter and you’ll get a download link straight to your inbox. It’s free, available for Mac and Windows. If you’d rather not subscribe, the full source code is on GitHub under the GPL v3 licence. Compile it yourself with PyInstaller and the instructions in the README.