My goal with selling sound effects packs is to make the lean times less lean by creating a passive income stream. You don’t want to have to sell 300 copies just to make your rate on the time you put in. Make the lean times less lean by creating a passive income stream. The other thing to factor in is how much time you spent on the collection.Īll-in if you spent 40 hours on it, price the collection so that 5 or 6 sales cover your 40 hours. If you were able to get access to something quite rare, then the price should reflect the scarcity of the item that you are recording. You should take into account the uniqueness of the collection also. Did I have to pay for access to the item? Did I have to rent or purchase any specific gear for this collection? These are things that should be built into the price. Usually what I do is start by looking at comparable products that are available. Without getting too much into economics and supply & demand, this section should help you price your products. I get a lot of questions about how I come up with a price for an individual collection.
While they have great sounds, I find myself using them less and less because they’re less efficient to search. Without naming naming names, there are some notable offenders out there that do not include this stuff. It makes the investment harder to use because you end up spending so much time figuring out what each sound is and categorizing it yourself. Metadata is quite powerful and it makes the library experience so much more enjoyable when the embedded metadata is well grounded. Most sound designers HATE when a library they just spent good money on doesn’t come with embedded metadata. There are a lot of great articles out there about metadata. If you don’t know what metadata is, you should take the time to do some research. Pick one that works for your collection that you are comfortable with.ĥ: Finally… metadata. There are a million ways to name and organize your files. I personally use a “collection_object_action_#” method. Tire squeals on the other hand could be mastered to -1db no problem.Ĥ: Name your files in a way that makes sense and makes it easy to search/sort. Foley gear doesn’t need to be mastered to -1db seeing as it’s usually going to be playing back well below that. I try to have sounds playback at a level that makes sense for what it is. Some of us like to have dynamic range to play with when we design! Master your files so that categories of sounds are playing back at a similar perceived loudness and timbre. Don’t brick the stuff, leave that to your customer. If you need to improve your signal to noise ratio, do it in a way that’s transparent and that won’t detract from your recording.ĮQ to taste to accentuate the interesting parts of the sound. If you tout the physical size of your collections when you advertise, your customers will thank you for not charging them for extraneous megabytes of silence. Top and tail your files to the first and last modulation so that you’re keeping file size to a minimum.
If you don’t like it, chances are someone else won’t like it either.ģ: Your sounds should be cleaned from any pops, clicks and mic bumps. This will make your editing, processing and naming much easier from the start.Ģ: Listen to your raw material and reject any sound that doesn’t fit or doesn’t meet with your standards. My go to steps are as follows:ġ: Group related sounds on their own track. Most often times, this takes longer than the actual recording time. Just as daunting as the recording process is the post process. In this second part, he takes a look at post processing your sounds, and the things you have to consider when pricing your work: Post process
Kontakt 6 metadata preset library how to#
In Part 1, Mark shared his tips on how to come up with ideas for your new library, and finding great material to record. This is Part 2 of a guest blog post by sound designer Mark Camperell, Founder & Creative Director at Empty Sea Audio and its sister company, The Library by Empty Sea: