Sound libraries: an affordable way to fill you music and sound effects needs

Post, June, 2002 by Edmond M. Rosenthal

At NAB, mSoft demo'd MusiCue, which president Amnon Sarig says is supplied by all the major music libraries and many smaller ones, adding up to about 9,000 CDs. These have been put on RAID 5 hard drives, with everything mastered at 48 KHz as MPEG 320-bit compressed files.

So far, local area networks with this capability have been installed at 20 facilities, including Turner Broadcasting, 20th Century Fox, Discovery Channel and CBS, LA. Sarig notes that, at CBS, all producers of promotions and other on-air material have simultaneous access over a Gigabit Ethernet network installed there.

After producers audition music or sound effects, with one click, their choices are dropped into a basket that belongs to a specific program. The sound editor on a digital audio or video workstation gets the entire basket of sound chosen by the producer in 48 KHz sound. Only the editors have access to full quality sound, Sarig says, because CBS is concerned about copyright issues. The entire sound basket for a show is converted to a cue sheet for reporting to the music societies and library publishers, for royalty purposes.

Sarig notes, "We have two modules of delivery. One is for large users with a minimum of 2TB, costing about $40,000. For smaller facilities with as few as 100 GB, we have one for $15,000."

There is also an offering for "mom and pop shops," an arrangement with several music libraries to deliver hard drives through FireWire for Macs or USB for PCs, with the music premastered on them. Not requiring a LAN setup, this service is searchable through the Internet.

Search and download

Libraries supplying the mSoft services can take advantage of a mechanism that automatically expires their libraries for specific users at a given date, unless the blanket licensing agreement is renewed.

Sonomic has two products built around the Sonomic Sound Engine, according to CEO Adam Strauss. Both can perform rapid searches for sound effects, using standard keyword search, category search and advanced combinations of the two.

The server-based Sonomic Total Library Server is aimed at high-end studios that already have large sound libraries. CBS Television, NYC, is one of these clients that had all of its CDs categorized, , digitized and placed on a server, allowing it to quickly search, audition ion import tracks.

"Instead of spending hours listening to CDs," Strauss says, "they can search the server and get instantaneous results. Then they import the sounds to their [Digidesign] Pro Tools."

If the user does not have a certain sound in its library, a in le mouse-click searches the Sonomic Online Library and then downloads CD quality files in AIFF or WAV. Sound effects come from about 20 sound libraries and total more than 200,000 sound pliers include Valentino Sound Effects, Sound Ideas, Zero-G and Clack Sound Library.

Payments to the online library are made by secure credit card transaction. Clients can pay by the sound, but unlimited access to all the sound effects libraries.

Opus 1 is on television