Did the Ad Really Air? Like Text Search, but for Sound
Published: October 25, 2026 Author: Vitaly
Finding a word in a text takes a second: Ctrl+F, and there it is. Sound never worked that way.
To learn where a jingle played in a three-hour recording, you had to listen to it. We made a program
that searches sound the way a text editor searches words.
A familiar story
A radio station sold an advertiser nine plays of a spot in the morning show. A week later the client asks: did they all air? The automation log shows the spot was scheduled, but not that it actually played in full, instead of being cut by the news or replaced with another version. The honest answer is only in the air-check recording. And that is a full day of audio for every day.
Other people have the same problem in different clothes:
- a podcaster needs to find a sponsor read in all two hundred episodes to replace it;
- a call center needs to be sure the mandatory disclaimer was really played in the call recordings;
- an archivist needs to find a known excerpt in hundreds of hours of old tapes;
- a musician wants to check where their track or sample appears in long recordings.
There are online audio recognition services, but they want your recordings on their server. That is slow for multi-hour files and often simply not allowed: pre-release ads, court evidence, confidential calls and interviews do not go to someone else's server.
Meet Audio Scanner
Audio Scanner is a new Windows program from Bolide Software. You give it short clips (a jingle, an ad spot, an intro, a piece of music, any sound) and long recordings, press Find and get every occurrence with its exact start and end time, a similarity percentage and the play count of every clip. Many clips and a whole folder of recordings are checked in one pass.
The program compares acoustic fingerprints, not file bytes. So the format and bitrate do not matter: a spot in WAV is found in an air check recorded to MP3, and if it played quieter or louder, was cut off or had the host talking over it, it is still found. A partial play is marked together with the part that actually sounded, for example “partial 2.1–7.0 s”.
Eight station spots found in air checks: every play with its time, similarity and waveform
What it does
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Counts the plays
The Summary tab shows how many times each spot played in each recording, with totals. Did the client's ad air nine times, as booked? One look answers that.
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Shows the real air time
Air-check loggers name files by the time the recording started, such as 2026-10-20_14-00.mp3. Audio Scanner takes the time from there, from the file date or from what you set by hand, and every play gets a wall-clock time instead of an offset from the start of the file.
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Makes a proof-of-play report
An HTML report for the client: what was searched and where, the play count table, every play with its time. Send it or print it from the browser. The list of finds also exports to CSV for Excel.
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Lets you check by ear
Click a find and it opens on the waveform, where all the finds are marked. Listen to it, switch A/B between the original clip and the find, mark it as confirmed or false.
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Never says “not found” on a guess
The sensitivity changes on the fly, with no re-scan. Finds below the threshold stay in the list, greyed out as “possible”, so a missed spot is visible even when the program is not sure about it.
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Helps the editor
All finds in a recording export as Audacity labels, a cue sheet or Adobe Audition markers, and any find can be saved as WAV.
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Runs on a schedule
The command line searches without opening the window and writes the report, so Windows Task Scheduler can prepare a report for yesterday's broadcast every morning.
Fast on very long recordings
Audio Scanner reads a recording once and checks all clips at the same time, on all processor cores. A 24-hour MP3 recording checked for 50 spots takes about a minute on an ordinary 4-core PC. It needs less than 200 MB of memory, and that does not grow with the length of the recording. Recordings scanned once are remembered: a new spot is checked against the whole archive in seconds, without decoding it again.
Your audio stays yours
Audio Scanner runs entirely on your own PC: no account, no subscription, no internet connection needed for searching. Your recordings go nowhere.
The only exception is yours to make. If a spot is missed or found wrongly, you can send us that case so we can improve the search. The window lists exactly what goes out (the clip and a short piece of the recording around the place), and nothing is sent without your consent.
How to start
- Add fragments, the clips you are looking for. A set of clips can be saved and reused.
- Add records, where to look: files or whole folders with subfolders.
- Press Find. The finds appear as the search goes.
- Check and export the report, CSV or markers. Everything is saved as a project you can come back to.
Free version and license
The free version finds, shows and plays all occurrences with no time limit, so you can try it on your own recordings right away. A license for $59.95, one-time with no subscription, unlocks the HTML report, export to CSV and editor markers, copying the results and the command line. It covers both home and office use.
Audio Scanner runs on Windows 10 and 11 and reads MP3, WAV, AIFF, FLAC, AAC/M4A, ALAC, OGG, Opus, WMA, APE, WavPack and more. There is a mode for phone call recordings (8 kHz). The interface is in English and Russian. It comes from the makers of Audio Comparer, the duplicate music finder since 2008.