The Trend Towards Hard Drive and Usb Sound Effects Collections

The trend in distribution of sound effects is toward distributing sound effects collections on hard drives or USB drives. By doing this, publishers are compiling a greater variety of formats and much higher quality sound effects then in the past.

An example of a hard drive collection is the Series 6,000 Hard Drive produced by long time sound effects producer Sound Ideas. The hard drive comes with more than 20,000 sound effects with all sound effects in digital broadcast WAV file format. Sound effects on the Sound Ideas Hard Drive can be selected in multiple formats such as 24 bit / 48 kHz, 16 bit/ 48 kHz, or 16 bit/ 44.1 kHz. At the same time, every WAV file is embedded with metadata (information about the file) that allows for easy searching of sound effects through asset management software such as Pro Tools or Itunes. The digital hard drive also contains enabled metadata from the Sound miner Toolset for easy searching of the productions.

In summary, a collection such as this could have never been compiled on CDs or DVDs in the past as it would have taken up way too much space! The Sound Ideas Series 6000 hard drive series contains the following:

• The "original" "General" Series 6000 CD collection which contains more than 7,500 sound effects from 40 different CDs with sound effects such as Animal & Birds, Construction, Crowds, Household, Military and much more.

• The second in the series, Sound Ideas Series 6000 Extension I which contains a wide variety of in demand sound effects from 20 different CDs digitally recorded.

• The third series, Series 6000 Extension II, which contains sound effect collections such as snowmobiles and huge variety of modern telephone sounds. All together approximately 10 CDs of the most comprehensive professional sound effects.

• The third, Sound Ideas Series 6000 Extension III which provides the Series 6000 Hard Drive with an endless variety of terrain vehicles and amazing selection of guns and weapons.

• The next Sound Ideas Series 6000 Extension IV which has a collection of airplane sound effects, water, rain and other liquid sound effects.

• The Sound Ideas Extension V which features selections of airplanes, motorcycles and trucks.

• The Series 6000 Extension VI adds 10 CDs and more than 2,500 sound effects once again. Many sounds such as vintage airplanes, crowd sounds to whoopee cushions.

• The Sound Ideas Series Extension VII adds sound effects such as unique "hits & impacts" with 10 more CDs and 2,000 more sound effects.

The trend to large hard drives and USB storage sound effects is going to continue as it makes for easier handling of large collection of sound effects. When you are looking for a hard drive sound effects collections look at the quality of the recording, the search software and whether the files come in multiple formats. This in summary will give you a great start on how to differentiate and compare some of the hard drive and USB collections.