How to use Surco

01

Install and open Surco

Download Surco for your system from the home page, or install it with Homebrew on macOS. The first time you open it, a wizard gets you set up in a minute: pick your default output format, the folder to save to and, if you like, paste your Discogs token.

No account, no subscription. Surco updates itself, so you'll always have the latest version without downloading again.

• Available for macOS (Apple Silicon and Intel), Windows and Linux, in five languages.
• The welcome wizard is just four steps; naming, genres and editor fields wait for you in Settings.
• You can change any setting later in Settings (⌘ ,).

02

Add your tracks

Drag files —or whole folders— onto the Surco window, or click “Add files” (⌘O) to pick them. You can also open an audio file with Surco from Finder or Explorer.

Surco reads each file's tags, duration and cover art on the fly and shows them in the list instantly. The same file is never added twice.

• Formats: WAV, FLAC, AIFF, ALAC, MP3, M4A, AAC, OGG, OPUS and more.
• Drop whole folders: Surco walks them and adds every audio file it finds — and tells you when new files show up in them later.
• Tracks show up immediately; tags and cover art load in the background.
• Closed the app? On launch it offers to reopen your last session — with your unapplied edits intact, even after an unexpected quit.

03

Get to know the track list

The left column is your work queue. Each row shows the title, artist, duration and a status dot telling you whether the track is untouched, processing, ready or errored. Once you analyze quality, a green (good) or amber (suspect) dot appears.

Press Space to preview the selected track in the floating player before converting. Drag the right edge to widen the list, or double-click it to fit the longest track name.

• Quick filters up top: Suspect, Good, Unanalyzed, Unconverted, Auto-matched — by source too —, Duplicates, Clipping, Silence to trim, Grid to review, and what's in (or missing from) your Apple Music or Engine DJ library.
• A search box filters the list by text, and you can sort it by name, artist, duration or format.
• Click to select one track; ⌘ (or Ctrl) + click to add several, and Shift + click for a range.
• The ✦ icon marks tracks Surco filled in automatically from Discogs.
• The player draws the track's waveform so you can scrub straight to any part, and continuous playback chains the list on its own.

04

Edit the metadata

Select a track and the editor on the right shows every field: title, artist, album, year, genre, label, catalog, BPM, key, grouping, comment and more. Edit anything and you'll get suggestions from your saved genres and groupings as one-click pills.

Up top you can give it a star rating and manage the cover art: drag to upload, export it, or move between the file's cover and the Discogs ones with the arrows. Track has a tidy filename but no tags? Click “Fill from filename” and Surco infers title and artist.

• Under BPM and key you'll see the value Surco detects from the audio itself — in Camelot or musical notation, per Settings — one click from applied.
• Only the fields you choose in Settings → Fields are shown, grouped into sections (Identity, Catalog, DJ and Order) so you stay oriented when many are on.
• Required fields turn red if you leave them empty.
• The cover shows its real pixel dimensions so you can judge sharpness.
• Copy and paste metadata —cover included— from one track to another via the context menu; ⌘Z undoes it whole.
• The { } menu on any text field inserts another field's value right at the cursor — no retyping what the track already knows.
• Mystery track? A button searches Google with the file name already typed, and a command numbers the selection in list order (1, 2, 3…).
• The Properties section shows the file's spec sheet —codec, sample rate, bit depth, channels, bitrate, path and size— and tells you when the file doesn't match the quality you ask for in Settings, in case you want to reconvert it.
• Editor sections fold and reorder to taste in Settings → Editor, and any of them expands to fill the window (Esc to come back).

05

Check the real quality

Open the quality section and Surco draws the track's spectrum: frequencies from bottom to top across the song. A true lossless file reaches ~22 kHz; an MP3 disguised as WAV cuts off sharply around 16 kHz and leaves a gap up high. A dashed line marks where it cuts.

Below it, a color-coded readout sums up the levels: integrated LUFS, true peak, dynamics, channel balance, DC offset and noise floor — green, amber or red at a glance. To analyze the whole queue at once, use the toolbar button or ⌘⇧A.

Each track wears its verdict as a badge right in the list, and you can filter by “Suspect”, “Good” or “Unanalyzed” to triage a freshly dropped folder. The check pays off before a gig: a cutoff you’d never hear on headphones shows up the moment the track plays on a big rig.

• Green “good quality”: the sound reaches all the way up, nothing missing.
• Amber “suspect”: a sharp early cutoff — likely a re-encoded fake.
• The loudness section also draws the waveform: zoom into any part, see real clipping marked in red and preview how the track will look after normalizing — and, once converted, compare the before and after side by side or overlaid.
• Save a PNG report of the spectrum —verdict and cutoff line included— to share when someone asks about that track.
• Turn on “Analyze quality on import” in Settings and every file you drop analyzes itself in the background, so the suspects flag themselves without you lifting a finger.
• You can turn off the spectrum or loudness in Settings → Editor if you don't use them.

06

Take the vinyl clicks out

A vinyl rip carries the needle's clicks and pops baked into the audio. The click repair section detects them and interpolates them away as it converts, at four strengths: off, soft, standard and strong. Soft is the lightest touch, for delicate material; strong catches long pops too, at the cost of softening the odd transient.

Surco marks every click it finds on the waveform, so a dirty record reads at a glance instead of as a number. A click lasts milliseconds and you'll never find it by dragging: hit “Next click” to walk them one by one, click a mark to hear that one, or drop the cursor anywhere and press Space to play from there.

The part that matters is “Hear the result”: Surco renders the whole repaired track and lets you flip between it and the original while it plays, with no gap in the audio. That instant switch is exactly what's needed — if the repair has eaten the attack of a snare, the difference is subtle, and subtle differences only show up when you switch in the moment.

• Ships off: you decide whether a track needs it.
• Every detected click is marked on the wave, and you can jump between them.
• The A/B compares the repaired track against the original with no gap, so you hear whether the repair took some music with it.
• It repairs the audio on conversion, so it re-encodes: check the cue point note before applying it to a WAV or FLAC that carries cues.

07

Trim the silence

Rips tend to open with the needle dropping and close on a few seconds of empty groove. The trim section detects the silence at the head and the tail and shows you both cuts on the waveform, one per lane: the start and the end.

Each cut moves with handles and with millisecond nudges, and each lane has its own zoom and its own audition, so you hear exactly how the track comes in and goes out before you apply anything. Not convinced? Reset it. And if several tracks need it, you can trim the whole selection at once from the command palette.

• Two lanes: one for the head cut and one for the tail, each with its own zoom and audition.
• Millisecond precision, by handle or by nudge.
• The list's “Silence to trim” filter gathers the tracks that need it.
• Trimming re-encodes the audio and re-anchors Traktor's cues to the cut; on WAV and FLAC they're lost. Surco warns you in the section.

08

Tag from Discogs, Bandcamp and Deezer

In the editor, search the release by name or paste a Discogs release id directly and hit “Search” (or the / key). Surco lists the results with cover art, year and label; expand one to see its tracklist.

Click the matching track and Surco applies artist, album, year, genre, label, catalog and cover art in one go — the closest match is flagged “Suggested”. Search works with no setup; add your own Discogs token in Settings for a higher, private rate limit.

After self-released or exclusive tracks? Turn on Bandcamp too in Settings → Search: its results appear next to Discogs in the same list, each tagged by its source, and you pick the same way. Bandcamp needs no account or token. And the commercial stuff — pop, chart hits, radio singles — that neither catalog carries? That's what Deezer ships enabled for: no account or token either, covering exactly what Discogs and Bandcamp miss.

• Search by text or paste a release id if you already know it.
• With a token and the option on, Surco auto-matches tracks right after import.
• Your cover is kept if you already have one; the Discogs cover stays as an alternative.
• Rip signatures or watermarks polluting your titles? List them in Settings → Search and they're ignored when searching and matching — your tags stay untouched.
• With several sources on, a filter narrows the result list to a single one.

09

Auto-match: tagging without lifting a finger

With “Auto-match on import” enabled in Settings, every file you drop searches itself in the background across the sources you have on: Discogs first, with Bandcamp and Deezer as fallbacks. Surco scores each candidate against the file’s title, duration, track number and artist, and only if a match is confident does it apply the metadata for you — artist, album, year, genre, label and cover, exactly as if you had picked it by hand. If the file carries an ISRC in its tags (common in streaming downloads), Surco uses it to pin down the exact recording on Deezer, so the original single never gets mistaken for a similarly named remix.

If no candidate clears that bar, nothing is touched: the track is left for you, and opening its Discogs search shows the best one flagged “Suggested”, one click from confirmed. With the toggle off (the default) the same holds: Surco suggests, but never updates on its own.

• It never steps on your work: already-matched tracks are skipped, your cover art is kept, and re-running it only fills the gaps.
• It probes rows as they scroll into view, and your manual searches always go first, so it never drains the request limit.
• Filter the list by “Auto-matched” to review what it did, or run it on demand with “Auto-match all tracks”.
• The Activity panel shows the background work and explains every verdict: which signals matched and which candidates were ruled out.

10

Match a whole release

Imported an album or a multi-track EP? Select them all —⌘ + click one by one, or Shift + click for a range— and the editor switches to multi-track mode: the header reads “Editing N tracks” and any field you edit applies to the whole selection at once.

In the Discogs column, search the release just once. Surco loads it and builds a grid: your files on the left, a dropdown with the release's tracklist on the right. It auto-assigns each file to its song by duration —even when they all share the same name— and you reassign by hand any that missed. When it's right, hit “Apply to N” and tag them all at once.

• “Editing N tracks” header: edit title, artist, album or genre once for all of them.
• The grid pairs each file with a song from the tracklist; change any assignment from its dropdown.
• Duplicates are allowed: two files can point to the same song if needed.
• In multi-track mode the spectrum and filename are hidden, since they're per-track.

11

Name and organize the files

In Settings → Naming you build the name template with chips: click {artist}, {title}, {album}, {year}… and they're inserted at the cursor. A live preview shows the result. Use the / separator to create subfolders, e.g. {albumArtist}/{album}/{title}.

By default Surco keeps the original name. In the editor, the regenerate button applies your template to that track in one click, and the pencil opens a custom pattern just for it.

• Chips for every field: title, artist, album, year, genre, track #…
• The / separator creates subfolders on export.
• Optional: trim whitespace and zero-pad track numbers (03 instead of 3).
• The title has its own format too, collectors' style: set a pattern like ({trackNumber}) {title} ({year}) and apply it when you choose — from the title field's ⋯ menu or the command palette, never automatically.

12

Convert the track

The button at the bottom of the editor converts the selected track. The dropdown next to it picks the format: AIFF, WAV, FLAC or ALAC lossless, or MP3. If the track is already in that format, Surco copies it as-is instantly, without re-encoding.

Quality lives in Settings → Conversion: MP3 bitrate (320 down to 128 kbps, or VBR V0/V2), bit depth and sample rate — by default the source's are kept, with no needless re-encoding. Settings → Output decides where it goes: an output folder, your Apple Music library, your Engine DJ (Denon) library, next to the original — same-format exports take a “(2)” name, the source is never touched — or overwriting the original in place. If you want, turn on normalization (loudness or peak, with streaming, club or broadcast presets) to even out the volume. When it's done, “Show file” takes you to the result in Finder or Explorer.

• Formats: AIFF, WAV, FLAC and ALAC (lossless) and MP3 — 320 down to 128 kbps, or VBR V0/V2.
• Re-exporting to the same format, without touching the audio, keeps Traktor cue points.
• Normalization, trim and click repair re-encode the audio: on MP3 and AIFF the cues survive, on WAV and FLAC they're lost. They ship off and Surco warns you before you convert.
• After converting, send the originals to the trash in a single action.

13

Convert all your tracks

Once the queue is ready, “Convert all” (⌘⇧Enter) processes every convertible track at once and skips the ones already done. You'll see progress and, at the end, a summary of how many were converted, skipped or errored.

Heads up: convert all only converts and renames using the metadata they already have — it never reaches out to Discogs on its own. If you want fresh data first, run “Auto-match” (⌘⇧D) from the toolbar.

• Processes the whole queue at once; cancel mid-way if you need to.
• Conversions run in parallel, spreading across your machine's cores.
• Uses current metadata only: it downloads nothing from Discogs in the batch.
• The arrow next to the convert button switches format and destination for that batch only — your defaults stay as they were.

14

Take it to your decks

Surco doesn't stop at converting: it sends tracks straight to your Apple Music library (on macOS) or your Engine DJ (Denon) library as you convert, or exports the whole queue as a rekordbox (.xml), Traktor (.nml), Serato collection or M3U8 playlist from the export modal (⌘⇧E).

Tags and cover art travel inside the file, so your DJ software reads them with no extra steps.

• To Apple Music or Engine DJ in one click, during conversion.
• Export rekordbox (.xml) and Traktor (.nml) collections.
• Surco warns you if a track is already in your Apple Music library.
• Edit a track later and Surco updates its Apple Music copy instead of duplicating it.
• If Apple Music already held an old copy of that song, Surco spots it when adding the new one and offers to remove it.

15

Fly with the keyboard

Surco is built to run without a mouse. The command palette (⌘K) puts everything one search away, and almost every action has a shortcut: add files (⌘O), process track (⌘Enter), process all (⌘⇧Enter), analyze quality (⌘⇧A), auto-match (⌘⇧D), search Discogs (/) and navigate the list with the arrows.

Press ? any time to see the full list, and reassign any of them in Settings → Shortcuts.

• ⌘K opens the command palette; ? shows every shortcut.
• Space plays or pauses; the arrows move the selection, and ← → seek five seconds inside the track.
• ⌘1, ⌘2 and ⌘3 jump between the list, the search results and the editor without touching the mouse.
• ⌘F finds and replaces across every track, with regex if you need it, and tells you how many it will touch before it does.
• Every shortcut is reassignable in Settings.

16

Tune it to your taste

Settings (⌘ ,) holds everything you don't touch day to day: the language (Spanish, English, German, French or Portuguese), the theme (light, dark or automatic), your Discogs token and auto-matching, the default format, quality and destination, the name template, which fields you see and which are required, the maximum cover size and the shortcuts.

Set it up once and Surco honors your choices on every track.

• General, Search, Conversion, Output, Naming, Editor, Artwork, Fields, Shortcuts and Stats.
• Define recurring genres and groupings so they show up as suggestions.
• Choose which fields to show and which to require, and reorder them to taste or hit “Auto-organize” to sort them into sections in one click.
• The Stats tab tallies your lifetime numbers —tracks loaded, converted, analyzed…— and generates an image ready to share.
• In Artwork, smaller covers can be upscaled to your minimum size or cropped square, and a macOS option makes the Finder show the artwork of converted FLAC files.
• In Search you can limit Discogs results to vinyl, CD, file or cassette, and decide how many to see.
• Analysis is cached so it never runs twice; you can empty that cache, and open the error log, from Settings.
• Point the settings folder at iCloud Drive or Dropbox to share your preferences across Macs; the Discogs token never leaves your machine.