Somewhere in the long tradition of tools that exist mainly to stop producers finishing anything, a new one has arrived. It is called YPC, it lives at ypc2000.fun, it costs nothing, and it does something delightfully simple: it takes a YouTube video and lays it out across your computer keyboard like an MPC.
It is not really a plugin, more a browser toy that behaves like a piece of hardware. Paste in a link, and sixteen pads are assigned to random timestamps within the video. Hit the keys, or click with the mouse, and you are chopping. That is the whole pitch, and it works. The default load is Imogen Heap’s Hide and Seek, which is either a joke about the last twenty years of sampling culture or simply good taste. Possibly both.
Once you are past the novelty, there is a bit more under the bonnet than you would expect. Timestamps can be re-rolled at random or set by hand, each pad can be trimmed anywhere from a tenth of a second to eight seconds, and there is time-stretching on a per-pad basis. There is MIDI input straight through the browser, so if your finger drumming on a laptop keyboard is more enthusiasm than accuracy, you can plug in a pad controller and pretend you meant it. A 64 step sequencer handles the arrangement side, with swing and BPM, programmable either by step entry or by playing it in live. Projects export as JSON files, which means you can hand a patch to somebody else and let them work out what on earth you were thinking.
The look is straight out of the Akai playbook, all muted greys and warm accent colours, and it is developed by the producer Halfpast, who clearly knows exactly which nostalgia button is being pressed.
The obvious gap is audio export. You cannot bounce out what you have made, which is frustrating for about four seconds until you remember that almost everything on YouTube belongs to somebody. It is a sensible piece of self-preservation rather than an oversight. If you do land on something worth keeping, there is no shortage of desktop tools that will capture system audio and drop it into your DAW, and the usual rule applies with more force than ever: clear the sample before you put the record out. Nobody wants a publishing dispute over a chopped up documentary about clouds.
None of this is going to replace the machine on your desk, and it is not trying to. What it does is lower the barrier to the bit of sampling that actually matters, which is the messing about. Twenty years ago this required a hardware sampler and a fair amount of patience. Now it requires a browser tab and no self-discipline whatsoever.
Go on, then. It is free and available here
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