I wasn’t planning on sharing this publicly, but after watching the direction a lot of “AI audio” tools are taking, I felt like it was worth releasing and explaining why I built what I did.
A lot of AI tools in the audio space feel fundamentally exploitative to me.
Companies like Suno train on artists’ work without consent, then sell products explicitly designed to replace the very craft they extracted from. That’s not assistance. It’s not augmentation. It’s extraction, and it’s aimed at replacing standard tools and workflows entirely.
But the pattern shows up elsewhere too. AI-generated sample packs, “infinite” loop generators, and even platforms like Splice increasingly normalize the idea that creative labor is just raw material to be mined, remixed, and abstracted away from the people who made it.
I wanted to build a tool that respects craft instead of replacing it. So I built freqlab.
My wife is a sound designer. She has deep instincts for how audio should feel, how a compressor breathes, when saturation becomes musical instead of harsh, how reverb sits in a mix without washing everything out.
But when she wanted to turn those ideas into custom plugins, the path was brutal.
C++, DSP math, plugin frameworks, build systems. Basically learning an entire second career just to express ideas she already understood creatively.
freqlab is a desktop app where you create audio plugins by describing what you want in plain English. You talk to the chat, it writes the plugin code, and you hear the result in real time.
The goal isn’t to replace sound designers or producers, it’s to remove unnecessary barriers between creative intent and execution.
To support that, freqlab includes built-in audio preview tools so you can test plugins with signals, samples, or live input before exporting anything. There’s also real-time stereo, amplitude, and waveform monitoring so you can actually see how your plugin is affecting the signal as you iterate.
This isn’t a “press one button and become an artist” tool. If you’re looking to automate taste or churn out content, this isn’t for you. If you’re not already working in a DAW, this probably isn’t for you either.
It’s meant to help people who already have taste, intent, and ideas, but don’t want to spend years learning low-level implementation details just to try something out.
Importantly, freqlab is open source, and it uses a name-your-price model for anyone who wants to support the project. If you just want the binaries, you can also grab a release for free on GitHub.
Right now it’s macOS + Claude Code only. Depending on feedback, I’m open to adding OpenCode/Codex support and other platforms.
If you’re a producer, musician, or sound designer who’s ever thought “I wish a plugin existed that did exactly this” , my hope is that freqlab makes that thought actionable in minutes instead of months.