A few months ago, I asked about recording organization tools. Seems like organization works for most people, so I started thinking about searching by lyrical content.

A few months ago I posted here, asking to interview songwriters about their recording organization. The feedback was essentially: "Who cares?" and "I have a good system to organize my recordings, why would I change it?". I agree: Nobody really needs an app for organizing song ideas. Yet, many people do have quite some recordings on their hard drive and finding the right one when you look for it isn't always easy, even if all recordings are well labeled. Essentially the question becomes:

Why can't I search my recordings by what I sang/played instead of by filename?

You may remember: "I sang about sunshine and morning light". With 500+ voice memos it's a nightmare to figure out which file it was.

There are several voice recording apps that promise transcription of spoken text. However, in my experience, that usually only works for spoken text and not for singing. Reliably searching for voice memos by lyrics seems to need more than just transcription.

What are your experiences here? Have you found a solution to search voice recordings by lyrics (or maybe even other musical aspects like mood or instrumentation)? Or do you have a system for tagging, labeling and naming files that's good enough that you find everything right away?

Having a background in machine learning, I wondered: Shouldn't it be possible to search audio by lyrical content? And it seems that it is. I describe some of that at https://www.oudyo.com, and my initial prototype works quite well for my own audio recordings (with and without instruments).