10
Likely (and this may not be the answer you want to hear) you'll have to roll up your sleeves and build it. It's the hallmark of good BGz actually, building from the ground up. Finding some thick and dense air tones which create the right mood, a nice rumble, some HVAC tones and fluorescent buzzing, maybe OS alley drips if it's a wet scene, some OS tire ...
6
First off, go read the jetstreaming blog for tons of insights. Given everything that Paul says there -
I'd rate the value of a library on three different scales:
1) ability to use out of context:
Tim prebble's contact mics library and his tortured piano library are just overflowing with sounds that beg to be sped up, slowed down, and otherwise ...
6
No. This would come under the heading of selling "derivatives," which most licenses specify that you may not do. If you want to sell sound effects, they have to be ones that you own the distribution rights to...from source to finish.
This doesn't preclude you from hiring someone to record or generate some source material for you, but it would have to be in ...
5
Here's my process for creating loopable sound files:
Select a reasonable amount of audio from the tail end of the file ("reasonable" is variable and entirely dependent on the content of what you're working with), cut it off and paste it onto the front of the file. You'll need to make a crossfade from the tail end of the region you just cut onto the head of ...
3
I've always believed that if you are going to process a borrowed source to the extent of being unrecognizable, why not just create it originally? The purpose of borrowing, sampling a source would be to utilize a characteristic of the source. If it's truly processed past that point then why did you use it?
If you can only get the result desired by using the ...
3
I agree with Chuck.
A single library bundle, or perhaps 10, won't have much impact. You'll need to bulk up your library, and add to it over time. When your library grows, you'll see it take off.
A story from my own experience: I began selling individual downloads about 6 years ago. I had 2,500 sounds. I placed them on a handful of websites. They did ...
3
500 to 1000 downloads of a single sound library? No, you're probably not going to get that. 50 to 100 downloads maybe, and it would probably take you a year to get close to that number. 10 to 20 downloads of a library is realistic. I'm not trying to be negative, just being honest. The market is just not that big.
Now, if you're offering thousands of ...
3
this is a pretty good starting point for you: http://www.jetstreaming.org/2012/09/05/an-introduction-to-sound-effects-mastering/
Once you have read that article explore the rest of the jetstreaming blog, as a lot of it will be useful info for what you are tackling.
3
Before getting into the business I read a lot about the pride of using your own sounds. But I think that was comments by people with big budgets and years of experience. Many of the projects I've worked on has a limited budget and limited time.
I guess by stock you don't actually mean that as in Audiojungle, Pond5 and Audiomicro but more Sound Ideas, ...
3
I'd prefer to have it just chopped into sections 4-5 minutes long and have them labeled a,b,c,d,e etc. It makes it easy to import a short section when you only need 30 seconds of ambience but then you can piece them together if you need long sections.
2
I made I have a few, but one that gets used pretty frequently at the moment is a recording of a 12" speaker being fed a 5Hz square wave with a 100 watt amplifier. The mechanics of the speaker cone flapping all over the place and the higher sounds that start to creep in over time give me a great "breakup" layer to lots of different things I have to build. I ...
2
If your own sound works better than a library sound, then use it. If the library sound works better than your sound, then use it.
What matters is the whole composition and how it works, not that much individual sounds.
I would still try to avoid using commonly used library sounds as very exposed sounds in the mix or relying too much on library sounds "as ...
2
Hi Melissa,
Rene has covered the bulk of it (thanks for the mention, Rene!). If you produce a library with his three tips, you can't go wrong.
There's a few other things I'd add to supplement his post:
Distinctiveness: I find these categories do well: cars, guns,
multimedia (whooshes, buttons),
materials (water, wood, ice, fire),
weather (rain, waves, ...
2
Here is another perspective amongst some great posts already made. About 14 years ago I released an SFX library which was sold by all the usual suspects. It became very popular and sold well. A few years down the road one of the companies who was selling it released a library in the same genre. While working at my current and long-time gig I was auditioning ...
2
Actually, these days it's often hearing too much.
Sometimes it seems that current sound design follows the idea of 'everything must make a sound', even if in reality it really doesn't make a sound. For example, the other day I was watching an action film, one of the current big franchises. The main character unplugged a security camera, like a little 12v ...
2
Sound Dogs might be your best bet: http://sounddogs.com/
If you want a lot of door sounds, you could check out Sound Ideas door library: http://sound-ideas.com/9000.html
2
I'm certain it's a scam, and advise running the other direction immediately:
The website name alone is very suspect
"blog" posts on his site about his gear and DSLR shooting, are just a series of copy-pasted technical data with no opinionated and articulated details (e.g. not "taking the talk")
Zach King has no IMDb listing (especially so with how much ...
2
I had the same problem a few years ago, so I made Excel table for it manually from Juicer searcher, you can download it here - hope it'll help:
http://liquidblasted.net/other/juicy_sound_tracklist_4.zip
UPD: Here is a link to all tracklists for Digital Juice I, II, III and IV volumes:
http://liquidblasted.net/other/digital_juice_tracklists.zip
1
It might be "legit", but it's pretty obviously not (copyright-)free for others than some sort of non-profit hobbyists.
The net is full of sites with "Free SFX" and this site might be a collection of those, aimed at some hobbyist movie makers. The licenses for these "Free SFX" are generally for non-profit use only and the maintainer usually does not take any ...
1
I saw on your site that sounds are recorded at 44.1kHz 16 bits, most other libraries are in 96kHz 24 Bits... It's a huge difference when you are doing sound design, especially when you use pitch and time stretch effects.
1
Laura, let me tell you why your library actually defeats its purpose.
First of all, price. Do you know how many boutique sound effects libraries I can get for $1500? And even if I can't get 56k sound effects, I can get exactly what I need, without having to make a hole in my budget.
Most of the times, a freelancer such as myself will also have several ...
1
Just to add to the great comments already here.
@Shaun is indeed right about selling derivatives. It's not allowed, except in very special circumstances.
As @minion mentioned, I wrote about the "grey area" and that "nothing is created in a vacuum." That's mentioned in International law mostly because, if it wasn't, you could be sued for having ...
1
Maybe some endemic ambient libraries? I mean like nature, cities or rural countries. In your profile you pointed that you are from Portugal. How about a library like "Sound of Portugal"? :)
1
In my case, the choice between creating/using original, custom made sounds and using stock FX is always made by the budget of the project.
Some directors are not only concerned about originality, but also the copyrights though most of the stock FX are royalty free. That's why when I'm giving a quote, I give a lot details about the recording&editing ...
1
Reminds me of cymbal washes I used to find buried in CDs from Killer Tracks, APM, or other music licensing companies. If that's the case, you'd need to license this as a needle-drop or production wide buy-out, which could ultimately be expensive. It could get very expensive if you don't find its source, still use it, it turns out it does belong to a music ...
1
A short list:
All keyboards are mechanical. It's weird hearing a MacBook making the sound of a Model M.
"Silenced" guns. I get the feeling someone once just read the name "silencer" and assumed the rest. A silencer doesn't render a gunshot to a whilstly "theew".
Anything with a timer also beeps every second.
Doesn't matter if you've been shot in the lung/...
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
