Most songs do not start in a song file. They start as a hum into a phone at a bus stop, a verse typed into a notes app at midnight, a chord shape you recorded so you would not forget it. Then they sit there. A folder of four hundred files called "New Recording 213" is not a catalogue, it is a shoebox, and the reason you never go back through it is that there is no way to look.
The Ideas Inbox is where that material lives inside Song Cage: a staging area between capture and writing. This chapter covers getting things into it, and finding one thing again once there are hundreds.
What you'll learn
- The three ways material gets into the inbox: your phone, your computer, and pasted words
- What Song Cage will read, including written notes from Obsidian, Evernote, Notion, Bear, Apple Notes and Google Keep or Docs
- What happens to a recording as it imports, and what does not
- The Ideas room: search, filters and sorting for a catalogue you cannot scroll
- Which parts of the inbox a free account can reach
15.1 The three doors
Open the import panel with Add to Ideas at the top of the Ideas tab, or from the empty inbox screen. It has up to three tabs, and you only ever see the ones the version you are running can actually perform, so nothing here offers something that then refuses.
Phone. A QR code, live on screen. Point your camera at it and your phone opens a page for choosing recordings and sending them across. There is nothing to install, and it does not require the Song Cage mobile app or an account on the phone. This works in a browser as well as in the desktop app, which matters because the browser is where most people meet Song Cage first. When your phone and your computer are on the same network the recordings go directly between them and never leave the building. Some networks, particularly guest and office wifi, refuse to carry traffic between their own clients; when that happens the transfer falls back to an encrypted relay so it still works. The panel tells you what arrived, by name, as it lands.
Computer. Material already on this machine. In the desktop app this is a folder picker: choose a folder and Song Cage walks it, including subfolders, and remembers the permission so you do not re-grant it every launch. In a browser it is a drop area and a file picker, because a browser cannot walk a folder tree it was not handed, and cannot keep a permission between visits. Both read the same set of files, so the difference is how much you have to hand over each time rather than what Song Cage can read.
Words. Paste lyrics straight in. Always available, on every version. This is the one to reach for when the words are in a message thread or an email rather than a file.
The panel remembers which tab you used last, so if you always paste, you are not sent back to the QR code every time.
Inside the plugin, only the Words tab appears. A plugin's window cannot walk your disk or receive a transfer, and offering a door that then refuses would be worse than not offering it.
15.2 What Song Cage will read
Recordings: .m4a, .mp4, .aac, .mp3, .wav, .aiff, .caf, .flac, .ogg, .opus, .webm. That covers what phones actually produce, including the Voice Memos format on an iPhone and the formats Android recorders default to.
Written notes: .txt, .md, .rtf, .docx, .html, .csv, .json and .enex. That list is not arbitrary, it is what the note apps songwriters actually use produce when you export them:
- Obsidian: the vault is already a folder of
.md. Point Song Cage at it, there is nothing to export first. - Evernote: one
.enexfile holding an entire notebook. Song Cage reads every note inside it. - Notion: the export is one
.mdper page, plus.csvfor any database. - Bear:
.md,.txt,.rtfor.docx, whichever you choose. - Google Keep and Docs: a Takeout export, which gives Keep notes as
.htmland.json, and Docs as.docx. - Apple Notes: has no bulk export of its own, but the third-party tools people use produce
.md,.html,.txtor.rtf, which is why those four matter more than they look.
You do not have to sort recordings from words first. One folder can hold both, and one scan takes both, because a songwriter's folder is mixed and asking you to import it twice would be an implementation detail leaking into your afternoon.
.pdf and .pages are deliberately not on the list. Song Cage cannot reliably read either, and a file that appears in the list and then fails to import is worse than one that was never offered.
15.3 What import actually does
Files appear in the inbox immediately, and their melodies fill in behind them. That is two passes rather than one, and it is why you are not watching an empty panel for five minutes:
- The catalogue pass reads each file, works out how long a recording is, stores it, and creates one idea per file. This is fast: seconds for a whole library, not minutes.
- The melody pass then goes back over the recordings and works out the notes you sang, plus the key when it is confident enough to name one. This runs at roughly a fifth of realtime, so a twenty-second hum takes about four seconds, and several run at once.
The melody it finds is the same detection you get from Detect melody on a take you recorded inside the app. There is one detector, and imported material is not a second-class citizen of it.
What import does not do, deliberately: it does not work out the tempo, it does not transcribe your words from the audio, and it does not split a recording into sections. A recording arrives as a recording with its notes found. What it becomes is still yours to decide.
The limits, and where they are stated
Nothing is capped silently. Song Cage tells you on screen every time one of these bites:
- It walks up to eight levels of subfolder.
- It takes up to 5,000 files in one go, and says so when it stops rather than pretending that was all of them.
- A file over 50 MB is skipped, and named on screen so you know which one.
- A recording over twenty minutes still imports, it just is not analysed for melody, and its card says why.
If an import is interrupted, closing the app or losing power, it picks up where it stopped rather than starting the folder again.
15.4 Living with a big catalogue
The Ideas tab in the right-hand panel is 280 pixels wide and it is good at one thing: being one drag away from the song you are writing. Once you have two hundred captures, organising them needs more room than that.
Open the Ideas room from the toolbar, next to the song title. Same ideas, same name, the whole canvas. It carries the same waiting count the tab does, so the two can never tell you different numbers.
The room adds real search across your catalogue. Search reads more than titles: it looks inside the lyrics, the section tags and the chord names, and when the match is inside a lyric rather than the title it prints the matching line underneath with the hit highlighted, so you can see why a result came back. Most captures are named with a timestamp, which is exactly what makes that worth having.
Alongside search you can narrow by:
- Key, once the melody pass has found one
- Length, with a histogram of how your recordings are distributed
- Has a melody and has words
- Month it was captured
- Tags you have added, where selecting several narrows to ideas wearing all of them
and sort by last touched, newest, oldest, longest, shortest, or title.
Filters compose, so "E minor, under thirty seconds, has a melody, from March" is a question you can actually ask.
15.5 What a free account sees
Capture on your phone is free forever. What a Pro subscription pays for is the delivery of those captures to your desktop, which is a sync service with a running cost.
Anything you import yourself is different, and is never withheld. If you point Song Cage at your own folder, or paste your own words, that material is yours and it shows up whether or not you subscribe. Taking away work you just did in order to advertise a subscription would be a bait-and-switch, and it is not how this works.
So on a free account: your imported recordings and notes are all there, and a small strip tells you how many phone captures are waiting for a subscription to come across. Nothing is hidden without saying so.
15.6 Getting an idea into a song
Ideas are staging, not storage. Everything about moving one into a song, expanding a card into its lyric, chord and audio pieces, dragging any of those onto the timeline on its own, and what happens when you drop onto a section versus the gap between two, is covered in The Interface. A voice memo dropped into a song is copied rather than moved, so the original stays in your inbox.
An inbox is only worth having if you go back to it. That is the whole argument for search and the filters: not to store more, but to make the two hundred things you already recorded findable on the afternoon you need one of them.