earshot

earshot gives coding agents ears. An agent can build a product video in code but can't hear that the whoosh lands late or the key click sounds cheap. earshot turns audio into text an agent can reason about: what a file sounds like, how well it matches a description, where the best moment sits in a long recording, and a timestamped critique of a whole film. MIT licensed and free.

It runs on CPU as a CLI, a Python API and an MCP server, plus two agent skills. The first run downloads about 1.1 GB of open models, then it works offline. Each CLI call reloads the models in 20 to 40 seconds, so use the MCP server for real work. Version 0.3 adds 201 sound effects generated from code.

No paid tier; the only paid piece is an optional Gemini critique on your own key behind an explicit upload flag. Solo, small teams and larger teams: free, installed per machine.

The catch: it's brand new, one author, alpha, and the README admits its sound search can game its own models. And don't pip install earshot: that PyPI name belongs to an unrelated voice-detection library. Install from the repo.