Speaking about sound effects...

tenor_singer

Active Member
Hi everyone...

I am currently on the hunt for a good quality set of sound effects. I have a CD collection of a couple thousand sounds, but they really sound cheesy. I have also looked on line for sound effects to download and have not had a lot of success with my google searches (I am at a school and our search engine tends to block a lot of sound sites... you'd be amazed at how many of them link you to some form of porn).

My question for all of you professional sound engineers out there...

What CD's do you use for sound effects?

What on-line source do you use?

Thanks for any help.

Tenor...
 
Sounddogs.com

They have just about anything you could want, and most of it is set up to multittrack fairly easily.
 
I've bought a half dozen or so of commercially available effects CDs and they're all about the same. Across the board they're cheap sounding. The levels are low or there's distortion present, they sound cheaply digital or have background noise in them that you don't want. There are really only a couple good archives that are worth having, but they run into the thousands of dollars.

The best solution I've come up with is to record my own stuff. All it takes is a decent condenser mic and a small recorder like a DAT or MD walkman, or one of the new memory based jobs.
 
Sound dogs is good, i also use findsounds.com. My professor reccomended http://www.archive.org/index.php which I have not used yet, but it contains old sound clips and what not. At my school we pay for a service called media garden. It is like every sound effect that you find on the cds, but in digital form on campus. It is what i use the most.
 
Hey Tenor did you ever find a quality sound effects collection? I've found several on line... stage research sells a pretty impressive looking collection but it's a lot of money to spend for something that may be cheesy.

This thread sort of got lost in the download able department... with collections costing several hundred to several thousand downloading may be a lot more logical option.
 
SoundDogs for me too ... :)

Honestly, I've thought about pre-purchasing effects CDs, but ultimately you'll never have what you need when you need it. So better to just get an early start on each production as it comes up, find out what you needed, then start scrounging. Between web sites like SoundDogs, forums like this one, and your own mp3 tape recorder and dramatic friends around the theater, you'll probably be able to come up with just about whatever you need. And keep what you come across to build up your own library.
 

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