Apple bought Samplab's AI audio editor in a June 2026 asset deal, an EU filing shows

Apple bought the AI audio editor Samplab back in June 2026, and the public only found out on October 19.

That’s the day the European Commission added a new Apple entry, dated June 17, to its Digital Markets Act list of acquisitions. It says Apple, through a subsidiary, “will acquire certain assets of Samplab GmbH” and “offer employment to and hire certain Samplab employees.”

So this is an asset deal: Apple took the software and some of the people, and the Swiss company stayed behind. There’s no price, no headcount, and Apple hasn’t commented, 9to5Mac reported.

Samplab itself went offline on September 17, 2026. Type samplab.com into your browser today and you land on apple.com.

What Samplab’s AI audio editor did for musicians

Samplab called itself “the ultimate audio editor for musicians” and promised you could “edit audio files as if you were working with MIDI.”

So you dropped in a sample, and Samplab turned the sound into notes you could move. Change a note in a chord and it stays in key. Then export the chords as a MIDI file and play them with any instrument you like.

It also matched the tempo and key of different samples so they’d fit together, and split any audio into stems you could then edit note by note. (If stems are new to you, my stems cheatsheet explains what each one holds.)

Samplab ran as a VST3 and AU plugin inside your DAW, or as a desktop app. The free Basic tier took up to 10 seconds of mono audio per file. Premium and Complete took full-length stereo files, and Complete added Samplab’s Resynthesizer.

The hard part was polyphonic audio, which just means several notes at once, like a chord on a piano. Producer KSHMR called Samplab “pure magic” on its homepage and wrote that “no other program lets you tweak the notes of polyphonic audio while actually sounding good.”

The closest tool on my site that does this today is RipX DAW, which also edits single notes inside mixed audio. Universal Audio’s LUNA Studio has audio-to-MIDI and chord extraction too.

Why Apple’s June 2026 Samplab deal only surfaced in October

Apple counts as a “gatekeeper” under the EU’s Digital Markets Act, so it has to tell the Commission about deals like this one, MacRumors explains. The Commission published the Samplab entry 4 months after its June 17 date.

Swiss records show what happened to the company. Manuel Fritsche and Gian Marco Hutter registered Samplab GmbH in Altstätten in April 2021. On June 24, 2026, one week after the EU date, the company renamed itself Quitten GmbH, according to the St. Gallen commercial register.

Its new purpose is holding assets, in particular income from developing and selling music and audio software (my translation from the German). Startupticker reads it the same way: Apple appears to have bought the rights to the software, with sales income possibly flowing to Quitten GmbH.

Samplab’s users actually heard first. By June 21, 2026, 4 days after the EU date, samplab.com carried a wind-down notice. It promised refunds for the rest of any yearly subscription and a final version that keeps existing projects working.

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After many years of working on Samplab, we have made the decision to pursue a new opportunity.

Samplab is one of 11 Apple deals dated 2026 on that EU list. The entry right before it, dated June 9, covers Huxe, an AI audio briefing app founded by former NotebookLM developers. In January, Apple bought the audio startup Q.ai.

Will Samplab’s note editing end up in Logic Pro or GarageBand?

Apple hasn’t said a word. 9to5Mac wrote that it “isn’t hard to imagine” Samplab’s technology in Logic Pro or GarageBand, or helping Final Cut Pro’s audio editing.

MacRumors made the more specific point: Logic Pro already has Stem Splitter and Chord ID, so polyphonic note editing would be the new part. That was Samplab’s headline feature, changing one note inside a recorded chord without wrecking the sound.

So if Samplab was in your workflow, keep the final version installed, because the download page is gone. And keep an eye on the next Logic Pro release notes.