Harvester, a local first media collection tool for sample based artists

Harvester is a local-first media collection tool for sample-based artists, designed to gather source material for found sound, video collage, and other art projects. It allows users to paste links or batches of links into a Mac app, or send pages from Firefox, to harvest media. Each completed video harvest produces a silent H.264 MP4 and separate audio in a normally named folder, while downloaded originals are discarded and local input files are left untouched. The tool supports submitting multiple links or local files, naming links, choosing start/end times, and selecting export formats such as all-keyframe H.264 or smaller H.264, and separate 24-bit WAV or lossless FLAC audio. Users can preview completed videos, reveal their bundles, and retry failed jobs. The queue runs up to three acquisition workers, one per source at a time, with conversion serialized, and persists jobs locally while keeping provenance in private queue records. Harvester integrates with Chromatron for preparing clips for VDMX, with handoffs using local MP4 files through macOS and no upload. Source support includes dedicated adapters for YouTube and Reddit, and attempts for individual public media pages and direct media file links through yt-dlp's extractors. The signed Firefox extension offers options like Harvest now and Add to queue, feeding the same queue as the Dock app. Privacy features include no account, hosted backend, analytics, telemetry, or automatic uploads; all data stays on the user's Mac.