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Finders Keepers

Apr 1, 2003 12:00 PM, By Nick Peck

Whether they're working in film, television, video games, the Web, or electronic music, audio post-production professionals inevitably find themselves surrounded by a huge stockpile of sound effects. After you've been working with sound effects a while, your collection of field recordings, commercial sound-effects libraries, and processed sounds can easily grow to encompass tens of thousands of files.

Managing that much information in a way that lets you access the appropriate sounds when you need them can quickly become overwhelming. Fortunately, there are techniques to help tame the clutter and keep your precious sounds just a couple of mouse clicks away at all times.

MATERIAL GOALS

The first step in building a sound effects library is, of course, collecting a wealth of material, and the most important tool in that endeavor is a field recording system. A portable DAT (or MiniDisc) recorder combined with a stereo microphone can make a compact and affordable rig. A simple, portable system is easy to take on vacations and trips to exotic locales. Bowling alleys, old office buildings, freeway overpasses, the jungles of Burma, or the local welding shop are equally beautiful from the microphone's perspective. (For more on recording nature sounds, see “Going Wild” on p. 50.)

I began my library by taking my field recorder with me everywhere and simply experimenting. I quickly discovered that the ever-present hum of highway traffic and airplane noise during the day meant that late nights were typically better for exterior recordings.

Within buildings and factories, adopting the proper attitude is the key to getting great recordings. If you walk around looking like you're supposed to be there, people rarely question you. I've gotten terrific recordings of elevator relays booming thunderously in elevator shafts; huge, reverberant doors opening and closing in turn-of-the-century granite hallways; and dry, clinical office ambiences.

Field recording requires organization and patience. Always mark your tapes and tape boxes clearly, then capture the best material to your hard drive when you're back in the studio and the recording trip is still clear in your mind. Edit the recordings to keep only the most interesting takes, and cut out most of the dead air between the sounds you want to keep.

NAME DROPPING

A great time to gather material for your library is while getting paid for it. Every time I finish a new project, I cull through the recordings that I made to find permanent additions for my library. For example, I worked on a film called CQ, which takes place in late '60s swinging Paris. I recorded Foley artist Les Bloome manipulating all sorts of thrift-shop junk to reproduce clunky contraptions that fit the era. Once the film was complete, I sifted through the audio-file folders of my Digidesign Pro Tools sessions from the film and grabbed the most interesting stuff for future use. Remember that you will be revisiting your recordings repeatedly throughout your career, so the tighter and better organized you make them now, the less trouble you'll have later.

When recording ambient backgrounds, I like to capture five to ten minutes in the field and keep the best three minutes or so. When recording specific events, such as door slams, I typically record a dozen and keep about half of them. I then concatenate those six door closes into a single file, with about two seconds of silence after each slam. Rather than having a slew of files named Bathroom Door Close 1.aif, Bathroom Door Close 2.aif, and so forth, I end up with a single file named Bathroom Door Closes.aif. That keeps the visual clutter down when I'm looking for sounds later on.

LIBRARY RESOURCES

It has been my experience that the most satisfying and interesting sound effects are the ones that you create yourself. However, there are situations and types of sounds that are impossible or impractical to record, such as explosions, car accidents, and cockpit-perspective jet takeoffs. In addition, having a well-rounded general library of effects is the bedrock of post-production work. It is therefore not a bad idea to purchase a few off-the-shelf sound-effects libraries. The two main royalty-free sound-effects CD-publishing houses in North America are Sound Ideas (www.sound-ideas.com) and Hollywood Edge (www.hollywoodedge.com).

Both of these companies offer general-purpose sound libraries, such as the Sound Ideas 6000 series, as well as more specific sets, such as the Hollywood Edge Explosions for the 21st Century library. These libraries can be rather pricey, but look for deals and plan on buying one or two per year. I always wait for a project to come along that needs specific sounds a particular library has to offer; then I make the purchase.

I use BIAS Peak to transfer commercial sound-effects CDs onto my hard drive. Keep in mind that the copyright for these sound files is held by the CD publisher, and using libraries that you haven't purchased is prohibited. According to Sound Ideas, you can rip files from their CDs and use them from your hard drive as long as you own the CDs and have them in your possession. For further information on this subject, please refer to the company Web sites.

GET IT TOGETHER

Now that 40 GB hard drives have replaced stickers as the toy surprise in boxes of Cracker Jacks, it makes sense to keep your entire sound library readily available at all times. Materials scattered across DAT tapes, audio CDs, Zip disks, and various other sources should all be gathered together into a single hard-drive repository.

It has been my experience that many compatibility issues are resolved by deciding on a single file format, then batch-converting all your effects to the target format. For years I used the Pro Tools — compatible format of 16-bit, 44.1 kHz, Sound Designer II mono and split stereo (separate files for the left and right side of a stereo field). Sound Designer II has become a legacy format, though, as AIFF and Broadcast WAV have become the dominant cross-platform standard formats. Because of that, I have switched over to 16-bit, 44.1 kHz mono or stereo-interleaved AIFF files.

Over the past year, many of my newer sound effects have been recorded at 24-bit resolution. There are numerous programs you can use to batch-process your sound files to get them into a common format. Sonic Foundry Sound Forge is an excellent choice on the PC; on the Mac, Audio Ease BarbaBatch and Norman Franke's freeware SoundApp can handle the job.

CREATING CATEGORIES

So now you have a haystack of sound files, all nicely formatted to a common file standard. The next task is to organize them into manageable groupings. Fortunately, humans already have a lot of practice at this task. Nature has given us a terrific method for sifting through the incredible amount of information that fills our heads on a daily basis: categorization.

We think by organizing all of our incoming information and memories into categories, so it makes sense to organize the data in our sound-effects collection into categories that are meaningful to us (see Fig. 1). The organizational schema can be individual and personal, although there are some pretty obvious general categories, such as ambiences, vehicles, water, and wind.

If you work within a group of designers who must all access the same data, the categories should be generally agreed upon. Furthermore, some categories, like water, can be further broken down into rather large subcategories, such as drips, pours, splashes, and waterfalls. Further subdividing the sounds into sub-subcategories generally gets too involved for my taste. I've found that dividing a library into between 25 and 75 categories, with 3 to 8 subcategories for the broader categories that need them, works pretty well.

UP THE ORGANIZATION

Coming up with an effective system for naming all your files and sticking to that system is the key to organizing and maintaining your library. File names should have a clear and concise description of the file's content, a reference to the sound's source, and in many cases, a short category abbreviation. Special attention must be paid to the prefix or beginning section of the file names; that will determine how the files are viewed when listed in alphabetical order. When dealing with a Pro Tools session with 600 files in the region bin, attention to the prefix and naming convention can really save a lot of time and trouble.

I use the source-description-suffix format in my home studio. File names look like this: 6014.07 Med Crwd Convention.aif. The prefix refers to the Sound Ideas 6000 series, disc 14, track 7. I like this system because I know my library well, and I'm used to seeing it in that format. It's easy for me to see the location from which a particular file originated, and the visual clutter is kept to a minimum.

Another format that I really like is category-description-source-suffix. It puts a three- or four-letter category indicator at the beginning of the file; for example, MOTR Sm Servo Windup NP05.aif would be a recording of a small servo motor increasing in pitch, from volume 5 of my personal library. This approach offers the benefit of automatically grouping files into categories when alphabetized, making it a real winner.

UP FOR GRABS

I often select material by simply browsing through my hard drives in the Mac Finder or searching by file name using Apple's Sherlock utility. I then audition files in SoundApp and copy the sounds into my project (see Fig. 2). That approach can eventually become unwieldy, though, particularly if you start adding commercial sound-effects libraries to your collection. At that point, you should consider using a database.

If looking through your hard drive's folders is the equivalent of browsing a library's bookshelves, then using a sound-effects database is the equivalent of searching the library's card catalog. A database lets you find multiple audio files that meet specific criteria, audition the sounds, decide which ones you want to use, and copy them to a particular work folder. That sounds like a great way to work, and it is. However, like creating a card catalog, it's a large and tedious undertaking, demanding attention to detail and long hours at the computer. The payoff, though, is a sleek and efficient way to search through your data, and it can save untold hours in the post-production process.

DATABASE BASICS

My sound-effects library became large enough to warrant a database about four years ago. I couldn't find any affordable solutions for a one-man production house, so I decided to roll my own (see Fig. 3). I began by determining which fields, or data elements, for each sound effect were important to me: a unique identifier, a description, a category, whether the file was mono or stereo, and a path to the physical file location on the hard drive. I wanted to be able to search for a number of sound effects, to be able to audition the files directly within the database, and to then tag the files that I wanted to use. Finally, I wanted to be able to click a button to copy all the tagged files into a Pro Tools file folder for use in a session.

To make that happen, I needed three tools to work together. For the database, I used FileMaker's FileMaker Pro, an easy-to-use cross-platform database that is commonly used in homes and small businesses. For the sound playback/auditioning application, I used SoundApp. And to connect the two applications and handle file copying into my Pro Tools session, I used AppleScript, Apple's scripting language for interapplication communication and control.

Designing and implementing the FileMaker Pro database was quick and straightforward. The intuitive layout tools allowed me to get the core database working within a couple of hours. Next I had to fill in the database. Entering the information for my personal sound effects took a few months of tedious data entry, which I did in fits and starts between projects. Fortunately, the commercial sound-effects libraries were much easier. Both Sound Ideas and Hollywood Edge have databases in FileMaker format for all of their libraries. Adding their material was simply a matter of exporting the appropriate fields and records from their databases and importing the information into my own database.

The next phase of the project involved connecting information about the files on the hard drive to the database itself, so I could audition and copy files from within the database. That part of the project took a lot of programming and experimentation, but I eventually got it to work. I started by renaming all the commercial sound effects files from Track 1 (Peak's default track-naming scheme when extracting files) to something like 6016.25 FS Lthr Gravel.aif.

I did it by writing an application in Macromedia Director that took a text list of file descriptions from the database, then manipulated the text into the file-naming convention I wanted. The ID (“6016.25”) came from the original CD volume and track information. The description “FS Lthr Gravel” came from the original database description entry (“footsteps, leather on gravel”). The tricky part was coming up with a routine to parse the description, replacing common words with abbreviations (for example, “footsteps” to “FS”). Finally, the program took the revised list of file names, renamed the appropriate files automatically, then spit out a list of the new file names that I could import back into the database, connecting the descriptions to the physical files on the hard drive. Phew!

Now that sound-effects records in the database contained information about the file names and location of their corresponding files on the hard drive, the last task was to put that information to work, allowing me to audition and copy the files from the database. I am far from being an expert AppleScript programmer, but with a book and some pointers from AppleScript ace Larry the O, I was able to get the job done (see Fig. 4).

Auditioning sounds involved opening the selected sound file in SoundApp, which automatically played it back. Copying selected files into my Pro Tools session involved popping up a dialog box to select the target folder, then telling the Finder to copy into that folder all the items in the database that had been marked for copying.

Developing the database was tedious and, at times, difficult. But it works flawlessly, is quite stable, and does what I need it to. Unfortunately, Pro Tools does not support an in-depth AppleScript implementation, so I am unable to actually import sounds directly into a Pro Tools session. A future work-around would be to figure out how to drag and drop the sound files onto the Pro Tools icon via AppleScript, which would then import them directly into the session.

COMMERCIAL BREAK

If you feel that your library is large enough to need a database but you don't have the time or inclination to create one yourself, commercial solutions are available. My favorite is Soundminer's Soundminer ($895; www.soundminer.com). Soundminer was developed by sound designers at a Canadian audio-post facility. They originally developed it for their own needs then decided to enhance it and turn it into a commercial product. They have succeeded admirably, creating a clever and easy-to-use piece of software (see Fig. 5).

Soundminer's data-entry system is rather simple: dropping folders of sound files into the browser window adds them to your library. You can then add description information by typing, by searching and replacing text using their command-line interface, or by importing tab-delimited text data.

Soundminer lets you audition sound files directly within the application and displays the waveform visually. You can select regions of a sound file, then copy just those regions directly into your Pro Tools, MOTU Digital Performer, or Emagic Logic session. You can varispeed the files and even apply VST plug-ins to them before sending them to your DAW. And Soundminer allows you to customize the color scheme of its browser window, making it as hideous and unreadable as you can possibly tolerate. The included CD-ripping software provides library descriptions for most major commercial sound-effects libraries, which makes adding them to your system quite easy.

Soundminer is not without its flaws. It is powerful but has not reached full maturity; it still has some rough edges and missing features. It's great for searching for specific items, but not as good for browsing around. Though it was written for the Mac, it doesn't have a very Mac-oriented user interface, and it relies more on command-line typing than on selection devices such as pop-up menus. However, it is still early in the product's development, and I would assume that comments from users will encourage improvement and refinement. An OS X version has been released, and a server package ($995) allows multiple users to access the same online libraries with database administration routines to handle passwords, permissions, and so forth.

BEST-LAID PLANS

The larger your pile of information, the more worthless it becomes without good organization. Creating a library of your sounds requires planning, forethought, and patience. It is a project that is never completed, but grows with your library. While the implementation may not be as immediately gratifying as creating sounds or spotting effects to picture, the results of your effort can pay off handsomely with greatly enhanced productivity and creativity.

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Nick Peck is Sound Supervisor at LucasArts Entertainment. His Hammond organ soul-jazz quartet gigs around the San Francisco Bay Area. E-mail him at nick@perceptivesound.com or visit www.underthebigtree.com.