Searching sound effects libraries efficiently

- As we develop our sound design, sound effects libraries can be an incredibly useful tool. We can quickly fill our timeline with library sound effects and then later we can replace, augment, or design our own sounds if we want to customize. Users of Adobe Audition have access to some very good sound effects libraries courtesy of Adobe, and this movie will take a look at how to access those built in sound effects libraries, choose favorites, and start filling our timeline with those sound effects. To download Adobe sound effects libraries, we can go up to the Help menu under Download Sound Effects and More. And this will open us up into a browser where we have access to the Sound Effects library which contains 27 bundles and over 10,000 high-quality sound effects. It also gives us access to Music Loops and Beds and something called Soundbooth Scores which is coming soon. Let's look at the Sound Effects downloads. So in here we have a whole bunch of different bundles of different types of sound effects. We have everything from Ambience to Cartoon sound effects. And then we have things that are going to be super useful for sound design to motion graphics. These would be things like Imaging Elements, Impacts, Multimedia, Production Elements, Technology, those categories are going to contain sound effects that are super good for motion graphics. So we click here and we can download those links. It takes a few minutes to download, and I've already downloaded several of them so i wanna show you I put them in a folder on my desktop called Adobe SFX. So here in the Media Browser tab in Audition I have access to that folder which is just out on my Desktop, and if I open this up you can see two of those bundles, Production Elements and Technology have been downloaded. Now I wanna actually undock the Media Browser for a second here, and I can do that by clicking on this little pull-down menu and choose to Undock the Panel. Because I want to see these sound effects super big on my screen, and I'll show you why we need to make the window nice and big. So I'm gonna pull it way out here and then I'll open up the Production Elements and as I do this you'll see there's a lot of sound effects in this library and the names are quite long, so I need to make the window nice and big so I can see those names. Now notice how extensive this sound effects library is. There's tons of sound effects in here. So we can audition them one at a time. If we click on the name, then we can hit the Play button and we can here what it sounds like. (electronic sounds) So that was Production Element Title Transition Ascend 01. And there's an even faster way to start to scroll through these, and that's by turning on this button to the right called Auto-Play. Now each time I click on a sound effect, that sound effect will automatically play (electronic sounds) and then I can use the up and down arrows to just start scrolling through the sound effects. (electronic sounds) I can hear them as I go. Now, what I would do is I'd start to look for sound effects that are gonna work with my project. This is where our brainstorming comes in, we're looking for things that are gonna work together as a group and complement all of these markers we've spotted our timeline with. Now when you have so many sound effects like this at your disposal, it can be pretty daunting to go through them one at a time and pick your favorites, especially if you want to search through them efficiently. Adobe Audition doesn't offer any search capability, so that can take a long time to get through all these sound effects, and I just want to point out that there are some great third party applications out there that help you look through sound effects and search through your sound effects libraries and the best of these is an application called Soundminer. You can get to it at http://soundminer.com Soundminer is a separate app that let's you search Audition and categorize large sound effects libraries or sample libraries, and then you can export those sound effects right into your timeline. Now unfortunately a lot of that functionality isn't possible from within Audition, but I have a suggested workaround that can help you pick your favorites and have easy access to it. So let me show you that workaround. As you're scrolling through and you're finding sounds you like, let's say you're interested in whoosh sounds. These are at least alphabetically ordered, so they all start with Production Element, but if I scroll all the way down, eventually I get to Title Transition whooshes. So I'm gonna go down and I'm gonna get to the whoosh sounds which will be down here in the W's. So there we go. In the whoosh sounds, there's a specific sound effect I like and it's called Whoosh Short 06. Now let's take a listen to that. (whoosh sound) Ok, so that's a good sound effect for something that's flying into the screen. I want to save that as one of my favorites, so here's a good workaround to save a favorite. If you right-click on the sound effect, you can Reveal its location in your Finder. So I'll do that. It takes me out to the Finder and shows me the actual file out in the Finder. Now what I want to do is copy the file to the clipboard, so I can type cmd + C, which would be ctrl + C for Windows users, and then out on the Desktop, I'm gonna make another folder, make a new folder. So I'm gonna say shift + cmd + N, there we go. And out here I'm gonna say SFX Favorites. So this might be specific to the current session, or you might just have a general favorites folder, however you want to categorize them, either way I'm gonna make a SFX Favorites folder and I'm gonna cmd + V paste that sound effect right into that folder. Now back in Audition, I can redock my Media Browser just to get it sort of back into the fabric of my project. So I can just drag it and drop it right back in here to this panel. And you'll notice on the left, our Media Browser at the top level always has a Shortcuts area. And what I want to do is find that folder we made on our Desktop, and here it is, SFX Favorites, I'll right-click on that, and I'll say Add Shortcut. Now this shortcut's always going to be available in the top level of our Media Browser, and in it we should see our new sound effect, and there it is Production Element Title Transition 06. So once we've gone through and selected a whole bunch of sound effects that are appropriate for this project or just generally ones we like, we can have quick access to them in our Favorites folder. We don't have to search through all the sound effects every time we want to use them. Now, the Adobe sound libraries are pretty extensive and they're great sounding, but inevitably if you keep doing this kind of work, you're gonna want more sounds to choose from. A couple resources to toss out there for royalty-free, downloadable sounds is http://www.freesound.org This is an open-source forum where sound designers post sounds to share and they're royalty free. If you're interested in purchasing individual sound effects on sort of an a la carte basis, you should take a look at http://www.sounddogs.com There you can audition different sound effects and search through them online and download them one at a time for a price. For full sound effects libraries, you can look at http://www.sound-ideas.com and my personal favorite library is called Sound Storm. And all of that is aside from the idea of us making our own sound effects which we'll talk about in this course. Now that we have some of our favorite library sounds earmarked for the use in our project, we're gonna start syncing them up. In the next movie we'll be adding some of these sounds to our timeline.