Sound effects sell. It’s just one type of audio that has joined the race on the information superhighway to fulfill its promise, which some of us have been asking for and using for well over a decade now: The ability to send sound effects from a web site to a client at a moment’s notice.
Knowing that kind of thing sometimes makes it hard to believe that there was a time when sound effects discs took weeks to arrive! Weeks! And, when they did ar- rive, occasionally they were of pretty shoddy quality, requiring us to take hours to sort through the “sound catalog” and make functional.
All self-professed “audio geeks” and sound engineers alike are relieved, to say the very least, that those days have passed. Today, companies are looking for better and easier ways to make their audio libraries accessible to a greater number of users, while making sure their files are at higher resolution and ready to pop in to an already-running production.
That said, the latest craze of downloadable single files or entire libraries has been hampered by a bevy of issues. Not only is the Internet’s increasingly narrow bottleneck a...