Sonar

Type a producer or a type-beat phrase and hit Ping. Comma-separate to run several searches at once — lucki type beat, veeze type beat, detroit type beat comes back as one grid rather than three tabs. Reuploads of the same beat collapse into a single row, keeping whichever copy has the most views.

Results come from two places at once. Beats posted on verses.lol are pinned above the YouTube ones, because they carry a real BPM and key read off the listing rather than guessed from a title, and a button that opens the collab instead of a description you have to dig an email out of. The All / verses.lol / YouTube chips separate them.

The YouTube half needs the Sonar extension. Without it Sonar still searches and still plays, but only the verses.lol board comes back — the YouTube chip will be empty however you search. This is not a paywall or a trial; it is where the request has to come from, and there is more on that below.

The point of Sonar is that judging a beat costs one keystroke, and the verdict moves you to the next one automatically.

• S — save it to your stash, at the second you were at
• A — maybe; sets it aside for a second pass
• X — pass; never show this beat again
• J / K — next and previous
• D — jump to the drop
• U — undo the last verdict
• 1–5 — rate and save
• ? — the full key list

The same three buttons sit on every row if you would rather click, and the Tour button in the filter bar walks through all of it in the product whenever you want it again.

The bars behind the scrubber are the seconds YouTube viewers replay most. D skips straight to the tallest one, which on a type beat is nearly always the hook — so you hear the part that decides it instead of waiting through the intro.

Previews also start past the producer tag rather than at zero. Where a beat has no replay data, D falls back to a bit before the middle.

Heat is views per day — recent and doing numbers. It is the sort YouTube does not offer, and it is the default here, because a beat with 12,000 views in a day is a different proposition from one with 12,000 views over four years.

• Undiscovered — recent uploads from channels nobody has found yet. Cheaper leases, less competition, and the producer answers.
• For you — ranked by what you have saved and passed. Stays off until you have made eight judgements, because a model built on three examples is noise wearing a confident label.
• Newest, Views, Shortest — what they say.

Every save and every pass is an example. Sonar builds a picture of the producers you keep, the producers you skip, the words in a title that predict each way, and the tempo you tend to land on. Every score it gives a beat breaks down into reasons you can read — which producer, which word, and how much each counted.

Anything you have already judged drops out of future searches, so the results get cleaner the longer you use it. The footer says how many were filtered that way, and Hide judged brings them back.

A BPM or key filter does not just sieve the results already on screen — when filtering leaves the grid too short, Sonar goes and searches for more. Deep goes further again: it runs extra phrasings of your query across several sort orders, then reads the back catalogues of the producers who dominate your results, which is the single biggest way to find beats YouTube search will not show you.

Beats found that last way are checked back against what you actually typed. A producer who ranks for drill also uploads plenty that is not drill, and without that check deep search quietly turns into “recent uploads by people adjacent to your search”.

Most type beats are posted with a free download, and the link is usually buried somewhere in the description. Sonar reads the description and pulls it out: a DL chip appears on the row, and the detail rail on the right turns it into a labelled Free download link. The Free DL filter narrows the grid to beats that have one.

The link goes to the producer’s own page — BeatStars, Hypeddit, DropTrack, Dropbox, wherever they put it. verses.lol does not download, convert or host the file, and there is no “YouTube to MP3” anywhere in Sonar. That is deliberate rather than unfinished: the producer’s own link hands you an untagged file, usually a higher-quality one than a rip, and it credits the person who made the beat.

Two things to expect. A beat has to be enrichedbefore its download can be found, because search results only carry a truncated description — so the chip tends to appear a moment after the row does, and the Free DL filter hides rows that have not been read yet. And Sonar only claims a link when the description actually presents it as a free download; a bare store link that says “buy” is left alone, and shows under Contact instead.

Install it from the Chrome Web Store — free, and it works in Chrome and Edge.

Beats posted on verses.lol work straight away. The YouTubehalf needs the Sonar browser extension, and the reason is worth stating plainly: without it, every search would leave from verses.lol's servers, so one shared connection would carry everybody's searching. With it, each search leaves from your own browser — your connection, your limits, nobody else's.

You keep using Sonar here exactly as before; the main thing that changes is where the request comes from. It can reach two sites and no others — youtube.com, to run the search, and verses.lol, to read your unread-message count for the toolbar badge. It has no access to any page you visit, and it makes its YouTube requests logged out, so it never touches your YouTube account. It also adds two right-click shortcuts on YouTube and the address-bar keyword vl, both of which just open a page here.

S saves the beat and the moment you were at. That matters more than it sounds: the bookmark exists precisely because 0:20 was not the part you cared about. Saved beats can be exported to CSV, Markdown or JSON, with the lease price, the free-download link and the producer's contact already pulled out of the description.

Everything you have judged is at verses.lol/sonar/stash — the Stashbutton at the end of Sonar's filter row is the way in, and the saved count in the footer goes to the same place. Three tabs, one per verdict: Saved, Maybe and Passed. Passed is there on purpose, because the reason to open it is to undo one. You can re-audition anything from its bookmark, move that bookmark, rate out of five, promote a maybe to saved, and unfile a beat so it comes back in searches.

Once you have judged eightbeats, Sonar stops showing an empty page. Open it with nothing in the box and it goes and looks — through the back catalogues of the producers you keep saving from, plus the verses.lol board, ranked by what it has learned. Below eight it says how many more it needs rather than guessing.

It reads the producers you save, not merely the ones you have judged: a producer you pass on every time is a strong signal, but not one worth fetching more from.