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What it is

My beat library had become a graveyard. In productive stretches I keep a beat-a-day cadence and things pile up fast — sketches, half-finished ideas, tracks too good to delete. Listening back was uninspired: open Finder, dig through subfolders, wait for Quick Look, listen to 30 seconds, try another. Good beats sank to the bottom of a folder tree and never came back up.

BeatCrate is the daily driver I built to fix that, a personal, single-user macOS app that ships unsigned, runs entirely local, no accounts, no cloud, no telemetry. Point it at where you keep your tracks and the whole library comes back as something you actually want to dig through.

• A catalogue, not a folder tree — the interface is organized around crates, each with its own cover and identity. You see the whole library at a glance, and the Home base keeps recent activity — most-played, notes, todos — top of mind.

  Home base (left) — stats and recent activity at a glance. Library (right) — every crate, one surface.

• Instant, level-matched preview — tap any track to audition it. Playback is buffer-cached for gapless resume, and it's a first-class macOS media citizen, so F7/F8/F9, the Now Playing widget, and media keys all drive it like a real player. Every track gets an integrated-loudness (LUFS) measurement so preview levels are matched and nothing jumps out louder than the rest — pure-Rust (symphonia + ebur128), no ffmpeg.

• Notes that travel into your DAW — every track has a notes panel: write down what you're hearing, what's missing, what to bring back next session. Tag tracks, star favorites, keep a todo list. And the notes travel — a companion VST3 + AU plugin loads in just about any Mac DAW (Logic, Ableton, Reaper, Bitwig, GarageBand) and reads the exact same database the app writes. Pick the crate and track in the plugin and your notes are right there on the channel: tick them off, add new ones, edit inline. Both stay in sync, and BeatCrate doesn't even have to be running.

  The notes panel in BeatCrate (left), and the companion plugin (right) showing the same notes — "Strolling out the MET" — loaded inside the DAW.

  

  The plugin in context — a small panel on the channel, driven by the shared database. (Shown in Ableton Live; it loads in any VST3 or AU host.)

• Career arc (Ableton) — when BeatCrate ingests your root folder it also reads your Ableton .als projects (gunzip + a read-only XML walk) and charts the ebbs and flows of your output over time: bursts, gaps, quiet months, prolific ones, peak year/month/day. This one view is Ableton-specific for now; the library, preview, and notes plugin work the same in any DAW.

  

  Career arc — projects over time, and the shape of your creative output.

• Live folder watcher — drop a new pack in and it shows up; rename a folder and it reconciles in place without losing your notes or tags. The library stays current without a manual re-scan.

• Local-first — everything lives in one SQLite database at ~/Library/Application Support/BeatCrate/beatcrate.db (the same file the plugin reads). No server, no network listener, no accounts, no telemetry, no cloud sync.

What's next

BeatCrate v1 is the daily driver I built for myself. A few things on my mind:

• Mobile companion — for the all-important car test of new tracks: cue up a crate, listen on the road, leave notes that sync back to the desktop.

Download

Grab the latest BeatCrate.dmg from Releases, open it, and drag BeatCrate to Applications. The companion plugin ships in the same release as BeatCrate-plugin-VST3-AU.zip — see plugin/ for install.

The app is unsigned (personal use, local-only), so macOS will refuse to open it on first launch. To open it anyway: right-click BeatCrate.app → Open → confirm; or System Settings → Privacy & Security → Open Anyway. macOS remembers after the first launch.

Stack

• UI: vanilla HTML / CSS / JS (no framework), Web Audio for playback, a WebGL mesh shader for the backdrop. The renderer talks to Rust over Tauri invoke() — no web server, no localhost, no HTTP.
• Core: Rust + Tauri 2, rusqlite (bundled SQLite, no system dependency). Audio duration via lofty, loudness via symphonia + ebur128, .als parsing via flate2
  • roxmltree, live watching via notify — all pure-Rust, no sidecars.
• Companion plugin: JUCE / C++, builds VST3 + AU — see plugin/.
• Packaging: Tauri (cargo tauri build, Apple Silicon / arm64, ~7 MB).

Build from source

# Requires: macOS (Apple Silicon), a Rust toolchain (https://rustup.rs),
# and the Tauri CLI (cargo install tauri-cli)
git clone https://github.com/andrewmfoster/BeatCrate.git
cd BeatCrate/src-tauri

cargo tauri dev      # dev app — compiles Rust, opens the window, hot-serves public/
cargo tauri build    # release .dmg → target/release/bundle/dmg/

The first Rust build is slow (it compiles a bundled SQLite + symphonia from source); incremental rebuilds are fast.

BeatCrate/
├── src-tauri/
│   ├── src/lib.rs          — Tauri builder, app state, startup ingest, live watcher
│   ├── src/commands.rs     — ~60 #[tauri::command]s (the renderer's whole API)
│   ├── src/db.rs           — SQLite schema + idempotent migrations
│   ├── src/ingestion.rs    — scans the music folder into crates + tracks
│   ├── src/als.rs          — Ableton .als project indexer
│   └── src/loudness.rs     — integrated-loudness (LUFS) analysis, pure-Rust
├── public/                 — single-page frontend (app.js · style.css · index.html)
├── plugin/                 — companion VST3 + AU plugin (JUCE / C++)
└── icon/ · screenshots/    — banner + README captures

Security & privacy

BeatCrate runs entirely on-device. There's no server and no network listener of any kind. Everything lives in one local SQLite database at ~/Library/Application Support/BeatCrate/beatcrate.db — the same file the companion plugin reads. No accounts, no telemetry, no cloud sync.

I'm a producer and hobbyist builder. Feedback and PRs welcome — if you spot something I missed, open an issue. See SECURITY.md to report a vulnerability privately.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.