About
Made by producers.
A small team in the north of England, building the tools we want to use.
Who we are
Kerf Audio is a small team in the north of England. Our backgrounds are in product design, app development and sound design, and members of the team have previously worked with companies like Splice and Loopmasters.
We make the tools we want in our own work, and we use them every day.
Product design
Taking audio products from the first idea to release.
Apps
Desktop, web and audio software, designed, built and shipped.
Sound design
Sounds and sample packs, made for producers to use.
Why Kerf
A kerf is the slot a saw blade leaves behind. It covers slicing, cutting and precision in one syllable, which is most of what these tools are about.
Each one starts as a fix for something that slowed down real work: modulation in REAPER that took too many windows, sampler prep in Live that meant bouncing and hoping. The tools ship when they are useful, with the rough edges stated plainly.
We are here to make it easier for people to create: new ideas where they help, and tools that get out of the way where they do not.
Humans first
Our tools are made for people, and most of our planning, testing and QA is done by people too.
No dark patterns, no telemetry
Our tools do not track how you use them: the only time they contact us is to activate a licence. And we do not use tricks to rush you into buying.
Open where it can be
We love open source and give back as much as we can. Clip Tool is MIT licensed, and free tools stay free.
Human-led, AI-assisted
We do not vibe code. Our small team comes from software development and product development, and the ideas, the design and the decisions come from people. We do use AI to assist that work, including agentic workflows, inside a strict software development lifecycle: every piece of work is planned and agreed by a person before it starts, every change is reviewed, and nothing ships without a human sign-off.
Testing and QA are where people matter most. We test our tools by hand in the hosts they run in, the way a producer would, and we have built numerous in-house testing tools so that every change is also checked automatically before it reaches you.
Our tools are for humans first. Where it helps, we also make them easy for AI tools to work with.
Linux first
Kerf is a Linux-first company. Our software is developed and tested on Linux first: on Omarchy, Fedora and Zorin OS.
We also have a long history with the Mac. Our macOS builds will support macOS Tahoe and every version after it.
We do not make Windows versions of our REAPER extensions or plugins, and we have no plans to. Doing a few platforms properly matters more to us than doing every platform. Clip Tool is the one exception: it runs inside Ableton Live, so it works wherever Live does, on macOS or Windows.
Pricing and licences
We do not agree with subscriptions for software you run on your own computer. We only charge by subscription where there is an ongoing cost behind it, such as cloud or AI services.
Most of our products come with a perpetual licence. Activate it online or offline, and for personal use, run it on every computer you own.
We do have to keep the lights on, so our prices cover what it costs to build and support our tools. Where we can, we also offer a free tier.
For organisations
Larger organisations, such as studios, schools, labels and companies, use our organisation tier. It is priced by the size and turnover of the organisation, and it covers unlimited seats: everyone in the organisation can use the tool, on as many computers as they need.
For charities
Charities and charitable music organisations can use our tools free, with our charity editions. Tell us about your organisation and what you would like to use, and we will set you up.
Work with us
We work with music companies on their products as well as our own: from the first idea through design, development and testing to release.
Behind our tools is our own technology, built in house: our own audio engine, and our own time-stretching and pitch-shifting algorithms. If you are building something that needs them, or needs a team that knows how producers work, we would like to hear about it.
Questions
Will you support VST3?
Yes, for all our plugins, once their CLAP versions are fully tested and working without issues. CLAP comes first; VST3 follows once it is right.
When is the macOS version coming?
We test on Linux first. Once a product works well there, it goes through dedicated QA and testing on macOS before we release it, so the Mac version follows the Linux one. Linux, macOS coming soon.