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 two ways material gets into the inbox: your phone and your computer
- 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
- Date groups, recording sessions, and buried ideas that come back on their own
- Listen through: going through your recordings one at a time
- Which parts of the inbox a free account can reach
15.1 The two doors
Open the import panel with Add to your ideas at the top of the Ideas tab, or from the empty inbox screen. It has two tabs, Phone and Computer, in the web app, the desktop app and the plugin alike.
Phone. A QR code, live on screen. Point your camera at it and your phone opens a page for choosing recordings or written notes and sending them across, or for pasting words straight in. There is nothing to install, and it does not require the Song Cage mobile app or an account on the phone. Song Cage on the computer does need you signed in: signed out, the tab shows Sign in in place of the code. This works in a browser and in the plugin as well as in the desktop app, which matters because the browser is where most people meet Song Cage first. In the desktop app, when your phone and your computer are on the same network, your files go directly between them and never leave the building. Everywhere else, and on networks that refuse to carry traffic between their own clients (particularly guest and office wifi), the transfer goes through 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, also on the menu bar as File > Import Voice Memos…: 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. The plugin offers a file picker too. All of them 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.
There is no tab for typing or pasting words, and that is deliberate: this panel is for material that is somewhere else, on a phone or in a folder, and words you are about to type are already here. Paste them into a line in Sheet view instead. A paste that carries section headers or chords is read as a song and lands as sections with the chords kept, rather than as an idea card you would then have to drag onto the timeline (Writing Lyrics). Words still arrive in the inbox from your phone, from note files on the Computer tab, and from the mobile lyric pad.
The panel remembers which tab you used last, so if you always send from your phone, you are not sent to the file picker every time.
Where an imported recording is kept depends on the licence. With the Song Cage licence it is backed up to your account, like a take you record, so it plays in the web app, the desktop app and the plugin alike. Without it, the recording stays on the device you imported it on, and its card says only on this device: the idea still appears wherever you sign in, but the audio plays only there. Buy the licence later and the recordings you imported on that device are backed up by themselves the next time you open Song Cage on it.
Inside the plugin, importing needs you signed in, because the plugin keeps what you import in your account rather than on the computer.
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. Each recording is dated by when it was made, read from the file itself or from a date in its name, rather than by the day you imported it, so an old memo lands in its own month.
- 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.
Shelves, date groups and sessions
The room's left-hand column sorts your ideas onto shelves, each with a count: Everything, Waiting, Marked (the ones you've starred), Used in songs, Voice, Words, Chords, Not analysed, Buried (untouched for six months or more) and Archived.
When the list is sorted by date (last touched, newest or oldest), it is cut into groups, each under a header with a count: Today, Yesterday, Previous 7 days, Previous 30 days, then one per month. Every group starts open. Click a header to fold it, and Song Cage remembers that on this device. In the room, hovering over a header shows Select, which picks every idea in that group. The Ideas tab uses the same groups, with your Marked ideas in a group of their own at the top.
In the room, recordings you imported or made on the computer go one step further. Takes recorded within half an hour of each other show as a single session row, led by the longest take and labelled with the count and the time, such as "3 recordings, Wed 12 Aug, 9:40pm to 10:05pm". Show all opens the session, and Make these one idea moves every take into the longest recording and puts the emptied ideas in Archived, with Undo in the message that follows. A recording you have marked, tagged, used in a song, or written words or chords into always keeps a row of its own.
At the top of Everything, while no search or filter is on, Back from Buried brings back three ideas you haven't touched in six months or more. They stay the same all day and are picked afresh each day. Not this one stops an idea coming back there, and Open Buried shows the whole shelf.
Listen through
A voice memo can't be judged from its row, so Song Cage can play your recordings to you one at a time. Press Listen on any group header (in the room or the Ideas tab), or Listen through above the room's list for the whole shelf. The room opens on the first recording, already playing, and skips anything with nothing to hear. For each one:
- Mark (M) stars it and moves on.
- Archive (A) puts it away and moves on. On an idea that's already archived, the button reads Restore.
- Skip (→) and Back (←) move without deciding.
- R renames it, Space plays and pauses, and Done (Esc) stops.
The run ends on a summary of how many you heard, marked and archived, with Undo for the archives, See what you marked, and Back to ideas. In the plugin, Space and Esc work on a Mac; on Windows, use the buttons.
15.5 What a free account sees
Capture on your phone is free forever. What the Song Cage licence pays for is the delivery of those captures to your Ideas Inbox in the web app, the desktop app and the plugin, which is a sync service with a running cost. The 14-day trial includes it too.
Anything you import yourself is different, and is never withheld. If you point Song Cage at your own folder, or send recordings or notes across from your phone, that material is yours and it shows up whether or not you own the licence. Taking away work you just did in order to advertise a purchase 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 example, "3 more are waiting from the Capture app"), with Get them beside it to open the licence offer. 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.