Insect Audio is a two-person operation. Maximilian Gärtner and Alexander Lotz build virtual instruments and audio plugins — starting with The Glockfather, a glockenspiel we recorded, sliced and argued about for longer than either of us planned.
We're not a label and not a startup. We're two people who ship things in the evenings and care about the parts nobody sees: how a sample library is structured, why round-robins fall apart at low velocities, what a plugin does to your CPU when you load forty instances.
What this blog is
Not a release feed. This is where the working notes go.
Some of it is instrument-building: sampling decisions, DSP, C++ and JUCE, the small compromises that turn a recording into something playable.
The rest is about a problem we ran into and couldn't stop thinking about. Sound libraries are essentially invisible to machines. A folder of WAVs tells you nothing about where a sound came from, who owns it, or what you're allowed to do with it. As AI tools move into music production, that gap stops being a filing annoyance and becomes a licensing question. So we write about metadata, provenance, and making a catalog readable by an agent — including our experiments with MCP.
We're based in Europe, we prefer open standards to locked platforms, and we'd rather be specific and wrong in public than vague and safe.
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