Audio Inspector

MCP Audio Inspector is a server that analyzes audio files and extracts rich metadata, helping game audio teams understand formats, quality, and memory implications. It integrates with MCP clients to enable automated analysis during asset pipelines and in tooling like Claude Desktop, streamlining game audio workflows.

How to use

You can run MCP Audio Inspector as a local server that your MCP client, such as Claude Desktop, can connect to, or use it directly from the command line for quick analyses. When used as a server, you configure your MCP client to start the inspector as a background process and send audio files for analysis. When used from the CLI, you pass a path to a single file or a directory for batch processing.

How to install

Prerequisites: install Node.js 18 or newer on your system.

Install the MCP Audio Inspector globally so you can run it from any directory.

npm install -g mcp-audio-inspector

Or use with npx:

npx mcp-audio-inspector

Configuration

Configure the MCP client (Claude Desktop) to start the inspector as a local process. Use the following MCP server config in your client’s MCP settings:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "audio-inspector": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "mcp-audio-inspector"],
      "env": {}
    }
  }
}

Usage as a standalone CLI tool

If you prefer a quick one-off analysis from the command line, you can run the inspector directly. The following commands analyze a single file, batch process a directory, or save output to a file.

npx mcp-audio-inspector --standalone path/to/audio.mp3
npx mcp-audio-inspector --batch path/to/audio/directory
npx mcp-audio-inspector --standalone audio.wav --output analysis.json

What you get back

The inspector returns detailed metadata for each analyzed file, including file info, container/codec details, technical parameters, common tags, and game-specific audio analysis that helps you decide on looping, compression, memory usage, and platform optimizations.

Output is structured to include file metadata, format details, tags, and a dedicated gameAudio section with loop suitability, recommended compression formats, memory estimates, and platform notes.

Supported formats

Primary support comes from the music-metadata library for popular audio types such as MP3, WAV, FLAC, OGG, M4A, AAC, WMA, AIFF, AU, WebM, Opus, APE, and MP4. FFprobe is available as a fallback to handle exotic or corrupted formats.

Tools and capabilities

Key tools and capabilities include analyzing a single audio file, batch analyzing directories, and listing supported formats. The MCP server exposes functions to extract comprehensive metadata and perform game-specific analysis as part of your asset pipeline.

Notes and tips

• Ensure Node.js 18+ is installed and FFmpeg/FFprobe is available if you need fallback analysis. - Use the MCP server inClaude Desktop to integrate metadata extraction directly into your asset workflows. - For batch workflows, point the inspector at a folder containing your audio assets and review the aggregated results.

Available tools

analyze_audio_file

Analyze a single audio file and extract comprehensive metadata.

analyze_audio_batch

Analyze all audio files in a directory, with optional recursive search.

get_supported_formats

Get the list of formats supported by the inspector.