Linux Audio Plugin Development (LAPD)
Sononym
Linux Audio developer interview with Bjørn Næsby from Sononym
This interview was conducted by Amadeus Paulussen in 2025 and first published to his blog.
Dear Bjørn, can you briefly introduce yourself and explain how you came to develop Sononym?
Sure. But first of all, I would like to thank you for doing these interviews. It's nice to learn something about the people behind the code.
Software can often be this strangely anonymous business, if you know what I mean?
Regarding how Sononym came into existence: I remember this quite clearly. In 2013, I had just arrived in Berlin and started to collaborate with Eduard Mueller on his Renoise sequencer.
Eduard is a brilliant developer with an eye for detail, so I was quite excited to contribute to his project - and I helped to bring the spinoff project, Redux, into the world as well.
When Renoise 3 was released, it was well received. And since there was basically nothing urgent for us to do, we started talking about different things, including ideas for future projects.
Simultaneously, I had discovered that freesound.org had a public API you could access and that this API had some pretty interesting characteristics you could query.
So I suggested that we could invent a new type of sample browser that could harness this type of information, also with an eye to the emerging field of artificial intelligence and machine learning.
That really was the humble beginning. And once we realized that similarity search would be a distinguishing feature, the project really took shape (and got its name).
Fast-forward to 2018, and we find ourselves at the SUPERBOOTH expo, demoing Sononym with a live microphone. :-)
Do you use Sononym yourself, and if yes, do you use it for music production or something else?
Of course! All the time - but more often than not, it's related to work. Imagine running Sononym with an open debugging console; then you know what I mean.
And I would love to spend more time making and performing music. I used to be very productive, but with family and kids, you tend to prioritize your free time a bit harder.
However, my love of music hasn't faded one bit - and fortunately, I have friends who keep my flame lit.
What are Sononym's USPs from your perspective?
Very simple: that our sample browser is based around the idea of exploring sounds based on their similarity to each other.
The entire application is built around this idea, and we try to think about how every new feature can contribute to this core idea.
What motivated you to offer Sononym not only for macOS and Windows, but also for Linux?
Renoise already had an established presence in the Linux world thanks to the cross-platform framework that Renoise is based on. And additionally, Ingolf Wagner (who was also on board for the first stages of development) was adamant about having us support this platform.
So I think the choice was quite easy. And it has turned out to be a surprisingly pleasant developer experience too - only the customer support is sometimes difficult due to the myriad of distros and configuration options.
Do you think that an Android or iPadOS version of Sononym as an idea (even if maybe only as a remote) could have potential?
That's funny - I pitched this idea to the other guys to begin with. Their response was lukewarm, at best. But actually, I still think it makes a lot of sense - and indeed, developing a "companion" app is on the table. Such a companion could take on different forms and sizes: as an Android/iOS app or as a plugin for your DAW. All I can say for sure is that such a product - when and if it arrives - will be offered for free, adding additional value to our product.
How do you see the development of, let's say, the last 3 years in the field of professional audio applications when it comes to the choice of software architecture?
Uhh, big question. But I think I see a tendency that teams are consolidating their codebase, focusing on fixing issues and streamlining things instead of piling new features on top. I guess this is a question of most senior developers having reached an age and maturity level where you find yourself in life circumstances where it simply isn't attractive to pull off all-night coding marathons. In general, I believe the software industry has much less of a cowboy mentality than it used to.
In your opinion, are there reasons that speak for or against one of the three big operating system platforms?
Each of the platforms has their own strengths and weaknesses.
But nowadays, Windows is the one I use the least. Ever-increasing amount of ads and FUD, I personally don't need that.
Does your work around Sononym involve a lot of support?
Not a lot, but it's a great opportunity to get to learn more about the pain points people have.
For example, we have a fair amount of support tickets involving people who have gathered really large quantities of samples through the years (into the millions, even) and experience that the application can become sluggish or even unresponsive. For those people, this has been an annoyance since the very beginning - and one that we are hoping to solve once and for all in our next update. And without those messages, I'm not sure we would ever have learned how common a problem this was.
Have you ever considered distributing Sononym as an open-source application, and if so, what were the arguments for and against?
Actually, yes! But to begin with, it was rather difficult, as part of the code was using a closed-source framework. But Eduard made an effort to "disentangle" that and has published AFEC on GitHub, complete with a GLP-3.0 license. AFEC is basically a (slightly outdated) version of the "crawler," the component that takes care of indexing files and saving their characteristics in an SQLite database.
What plans do you have for Sononym in the future? As a user, I would, for example, love to be able to search my library by criteria such as “calm”, “aggressive”, “sad”, “happy”, etc.
All I can say is: keep the ideas coming. Ideally, all good software evolves with the needs of the people using it.