However, as soon as Soundly launched it was doing things differently. How? In this post by sound effects guru Paul Virostek, he highlights five killer features that make Soundly break away from the pack.
Written by Paul Virostek
1. An introduction to Soundly
2. The Soundly Quick-Start Guide
3. How to Organize Sound Libraries with Soundly
4. How to Find and Use Sound FX Clips with Soundly
I just got word that Soundly kicked off a very special offer today, giving access to the full Soundly Pro version (with its approx 40.000 cloud sound effects & more) for free: All new and registered users can use the promo code SUMMER to unlock all the pro features for 14 days – no payment information needed.
New users, download Soundly for free for Windows here, and Mac here – and then enter the promo code SUMMER while registering. If you’re already registered, go to user -> profile within the Soundly app, and enter the code SUMMER in the promo box.
1. Organize Your Sound Library
What it does: Soundly makes it easy to add, sort, and search sound libraries. It can index local, cloud, and network clip collections. Adding sound fx is as simple as dragging and dropping them onto Soundly’s window. Each library is displayed separately, so filtering results is easy. The app provides search suggestions and tracks search history. Playback – including from the cloud – is fast and fluid. A slick waveform display allows playing and processing whole clips, and even smaller portions, too.
Why it’s cool: It’s a common problem. You have some sound fx on your laptop. Others are on an external drive on your desk. More still are scattered across a network NAS drive. It’s tedious to hunt and peck across a handful of locations to find the sound you need. It’s worse when you have the pressure of a deadline. Soundly keeps all your sounds in one place, lets you search them swiftly and audition them easily. It’s fast, effortless, and, with its new 2.0 interface, attractive, too.
2. Import Clips to Apps
What it is: Adding and finding clips is great, but sound pros need to use them, too. Soundly allows sound clips to be transferred to editing apps with a tap of a button. The app can send entire clips, or selected, small portions of longer files. It’s simple: just drag the section into an editing app and the clips is transferred. Pro Tools users have bonus features: single or multiple clips can be transferred with “handles” either to the cursor location in an editing timeline or the bin.
Why it’s cool: No one wants to be slowed down by digging through folders and navigating editing app file browsers. That slows work and kills creativity. With Soundly, a simple mouse drag can take the cool sound you’ve found and send it to any other app. It’s even quicker for Pro Tools and Reaper users: just click the Pro Tools icon to send the clip selection to the timeline cursor. That makes it faster to get clips into your project and get back to work.
3. Cloud Sound Library
What it is: Soundly doesn’t just manage clips, sort them, and send them to other apps. It launches with access to a professionally recorded sound library that is streamed instantly from the cloud. Any user can access 1000 popular clips, and Pro subscribers can choose from around 40,000. The sound library features everyday sounds that will are useful in any project, as well as elite recordings such as military vehicles, too. Want more? No problem. The Soundly store offers the Freesound.org library, as well as collections from independent community field recordists and sound designers.
Why it’s cool: Merely downloading the app gives users access to 1000 pro sound effects completely free of charge. That’s a good way for budget-conscious sound pros to enhance their existing sound collections. And, when you have a little more cash or are working on more demanding projects, getting instant access to 40,000 more clips is only a few clicks away. Soundly’s cloud library makes worrying about finding the right sound effect a thing of the past.
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Cinematic & Trailer Sound Effects Four Elements – Elemental Magic Play Track 3050 sounds included, 251 mins total $149
Master the Art of Bending the Elemental Forces
Unleash the raw power of fire, water, earth, and air with this comprehensive 9 GB sound library featuring 3050 high-quality sound effects across 630 files. Whether you’re designing cinematic soundscapes or enhancing video games Four Elements delivers the tools you need to harness the energy of the natural world.
Construction Kit – 2443 Sounds
A treasure trove of raw, organic, and processed sounds including seamless loops divided into Fire, Water, Air, Earth and Explosion categories. Customize every detail with an extensive selection of sound components.
- Organic Fire: Campfire sizzles, torch whooshes, and flame bursts.
- Processed Fire: Distorted impacts and unique crackles.
- Organic Earth: Rock crashes, gravel scrapes, and heavy stone hits.
- Processed Earth: Stylized rumbles and granular textures.
- Organic Water: Ocean waves, hydrophone bubbles, and fluid splashes.
- Processed Water: Underwater whooshes and stylized liquid smashes.
- Organic Air: Bamboo swishes, cloth movements, and pressure bursts.
- Processed Air: Filtered gusts and dynamic noise sweeps.
- Explosion: Firework detonations, Butane bursts, and cinematic impacts.
Building Blocks – 416 Sounds
Game-ready sound layers featuring Impacts, Whooshes, and Textures as seamless loops. Elevate transitions and enhance atmospheres with loops and pre-designed sound layers.
- Fire: Explosive bursts, blazing infernos, and warm embers.
- Earth: Ground-shaking impacts, crumbling terrain, and heavy collisions.
- Water: Cascading waves, serene rivers, and underwater ambiences.
- Air: Whispering breezes, stormy turbulence, and slicing gusts.
Design Kit – 192 Sounds
A collection of ready-to-use sound effects divided into Attack, Bend, and Explosion categories for quick integration into your projects. Perfect for high-energy scenes and immersive storytelling.
- Fire: Crackling flames, fiery bursts, and roaring infernos.
- Earth: Crushing impacts, shifting ground, and massive land eruptions.
- Water: Splashes, fluid manipulations, and crashing tidal waves.
- Air: Slicing winds, swirling currents, and thunderous gusts.
Four Elements gives you complete creative control, blending organic recordings with processed sound layers to meet the demands of any project. Master the forces of nature with Four Elements. Let your creativity ignite.
Keywords:
Elements, Fire, Water, Earth, Air, Wave, Water, Liquid, Rock, Cast, Stone, Pebble, Torch, Gas, Flame, Campfire, Sizzle, Burst, Scrape, Whoosh, Impact, Texture, Attack, Bend, Bending, Explosion, Processed, Surge, Quake, Hit, Flow, Burn, Ignite, Drop, Smack, Destruction, Rumble, Hiss, Blow, Wind, Cloth, Movement, Underwater, Bubble, Ocean, River, Lake, Firework, Firecracker, Bang, Blast, Detonation, Magic, Fantasy, Forces, Fire Magic, Water Magic, Earth Magic, Fire Air, Fire Effect, Fire Whoosh, Water Whoosh, Seamless Loop, Loop, Fire Cast, Water Cast, Earth Cast, Air Cast
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THE RAW SOUND OF CINEMATIC FIGHTING VIOLENT COMBAT is a professional sound effects library built for fight scenes that demand impact. Packed with punch sound effects, fight sound effects, and powerful combat sound effects, it delivers everything from raw realism to over-the-top cinematic action. With improved fidelity and greater variation than its predecessor CLOSE COMBAT, this collection gives sound designers production-ready audio for film, TV, and games.
From Realism to Cinematic ExaggerationDial in the tone you need with dedicated categories: Martial Arts, Grounded, Over The Top, and Gory. Whether it’s kung fu sound effects, karate sounds, or exaggerated wrestling hits, you can shift seamlessly from authentic to stylised.
Successor to Close CombatVIOLENT COMBAT builds on the legacy of CLOSE COMBAT with higher fidelity recordings, better-organised categories, and more variation. It’s the ideal companion, giving you the flexibility to cover every style of fight scene.
Sounds That Land With ForceRecorded with a wide range of props and techniques, each fighting sound effect has real weight. Where needed, selective pre-processing boosts impact, avoiding the flat results of real fight recordings.
Production-Ready and VersatileEqually at home in film, TV drama, high-end game audio, or immersive theatre. From knockout sound effects to stylised fight sequences, Violent Combat is ready to drop straight into your mix.
Included Sounds – KEYWORDS
AIR, BODYFALL, CLOTH, CRUNCH, FINISHER, FURNITURE, GORE, GRAB, GRAPPLE, IMPACT, KICK, LEATHER, MARTIAL ARTS, METAL, MOVEMENT, PLASTIC, PUNCH, SLAP, SWISH, SWOOSH, THROW, WHOOSH
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638 meticulously processed stereo fire spells sound effects recorded in 96 khz and 24 bits for high audio definition.
The collection comes with hundreds of variations, more than 1 hour of content and many different type of fire spells. It also includes source sounds for more flexibility for your projects.
This collection is perfect for any films, video games or trailers.
The library is fully focused on fire spells. You will find simple one shot magic firebolt, powerful high level fire spells, fire sword, berserker enchantments and so on. Spells such as fireball, firewall, rain of fire, meteor, fire nova, magma storm, pyroblast, sword of Avernus, etc. are included in this library.
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4. Metadata Editor
What it is: Soundly can embed invisible bonus metadata text to sound files. It reads popular iXML, BWAV, and MP3 formats, and writes back to the universal BWAV standard description field.
Why it’s cool: metadata’s bonus text information helps organize sound collections and find clips within them. That eliminates mental clutter, speeds sound clip selection, and help you make better choices. For sound librarians, Soundly can apply metadata in batches, too, making it easy to enhance existing sound collections with helpful metadata text. Worried that it will cost hundreds of dollars to do this, like any other metadata app? Don’t be. Soundly embeds metadata free of charge.
5. Cloud Collaboration
What it is: You’re hooked on Soundly. You’ve converted your colleagues and friends, too. That’s how Soundly’s fifth killer feature helps: Soundly’s cloud collaboration tools allow you to share sound libraries and playlists of clips with others. You can even upload your own sound libraries to the cloud so they can be shared, too.
Why it’s cool: Did you find the perfect bird ambience for a studio project? Maybe you found a fighter jet pass that’s the ideal building block for a starship. It’s easy to save it to a playlist, then email the sound supervisor or other editors your list of selections. When they have a license to the same library they can start working with those clips right away. Are you a lone wolf working on your own? Soundly hasn’t forgotten you, either. Soundly’s cloud storage allows you to upload your own clips to the cloud. That means you can access them at other facilities, or at home, after work.
These are just five cool features in Soundly. There are many others: granular search results sorting, text file import and export, audio processing, and much more.
Soundly released a brand new version last week, and here are some of the highlights from the release notes:
• Related Searches
Traversing through millions of past searches, Soundly’s AI-powered search algorithm now suggest related keywords for you. That means less time searching and more time discovering!
• Multi DB Support
Soundly can now simultaneously connect to multiple shared databases, making file and database organization even easier.
• Channel Select
A much asked for feature is finally here with Channel Select, making it incredibly easy to extract one or more specific channels from multichannel files.
• Portable Mode
Copy the Soundly application to a USB stick or similar and take it anywhere you go. Great for professionals using multiple studios!
• Did you Mean
Google-style Did You Mean Functionality helps you spell your searches correctly! Combined with Related Searches and the Sound Effect Thesaurus, Soundly’s search capabilities now stands in a class of its own.
• Thesaurus Update
Soundly’s specially built Sound Effect Thesaurus has grown and is now even more accurate.
A big thanks to Paul Virostek for this Soundly guide!
for Windows here, and Mac here.
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Cinematic & Trailer Sound Effects Four Elements – Elemental Magic Play Track 3050 sounds included, 251 mins total $149
Master the Art of Bending the Elemental Forces
Unleash the raw power of fire, water, earth, and air with this comprehensive 9 GB sound library featuring 3050 high-quality sound effects across 630 files. Whether you’re designing cinematic soundscapes or enhancing video games Four Elements delivers the tools you need to harness the energy of the natural world.
Construction Kit – 2443 Sounds
A treasure trove of raw, organic, and processed sounds including seamless loops divided into Fire, Water, Air, Earth and Explosion categories. Customize every detail with an extensive selection of sound components.
- Organic Fire: Campfire sizzles, torch whooshes, and flame bursts.
- Processed Fire: Distorted impacts and unique crackles.
- Organic Earth: Rock crashes, gravel scrapes, and heavy stone hits.
- Processed Earth: Stylized rumbles and granular textures.
- Organic Water: Ocean waves, hydrophone bubbles, and fluid splashes.
- Processed Water: Underwater whooshes and stylized liquid smashes.
- Organic Air: Bamboo swishes, cloth movements, and pressure bursts.
- Processed Air: Filtered gusts and dynamic noise sweeps.
- Explosion: Firework detonations, Butane bursts, and cinematic impacts.
Building Blocks – 416 Sounds
Game-ready sound layers featuring Impacts, Whooshes, and Textures as seamless loops. Elevate transitions and enhance atmospheres with loops and pre-designed sound layers.
- Fire: Explosive bursts, blazing infernos, and warm embers.
- Earth: Ground-shaking impacts, crumbling terrain, and heavy collisions.
- Water: Cascading waves, serene rivers, and underwater ambiences.
- Air: Whispering breezes, stormy turbulence, and slicing gusts.
Design Kit – 192 Sounds
A collection of ready-to-use sound effects divided into Attack, Bend, and Explosion categories for quick integration into your projects. Perfect for high-energy scenes and immersive storytelling.
- Fire: Crackling flames, fiery bursts, and roaring infernos.
- Earth: Crushing impacts, shifting ground, and massive land eruptions.
- Water: Splashes, fluid manipulations, and crashing tidal waves.
- Air: Slicing winds, swirling currents, and thunderous gusts.
Four Elements gives you complete creative control, blending organic recordings with processed sound layers to meet the demands of any project. Master the forces of nature with Four Elements. Let your creativity ignite.
Keywords:
Elements, Fire, Water, Earth, Air, Wave, Water, Liquid, Rock, Cast, Stone, Pebble, Torch, Gas, Flame, Campfire, Sizzle, Burst, Scrape, Whoosh, Impact, Texture, Attack, Bend, Bending, Explosion, Processed, Surge, Quake, Hit, Flow, Burn, Ignite, Drop, Smack, Destruction, Rumble, Hiss, Blow, Wind, Cloth, Movement, Underwater, Bubble, Ocean, River, Lake, Firework, Firecracker, Bang, Blast, Detonation, Magic, Fantasy, Forces, Fire Magic, Water Magic, Earth Magic, Fire Air, Fire Effect, Fire Whoosh, Water Whoosh, Seamless Loop, Loop, Fire Cast, Water Cast, Earth Cast, Air Cast
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THE RAW SOUND OF CINEMATIC FIGHTING VIOLENT COMBAT is a professional sound effects library built for fight scenes that demand impact. Packed with punch sound effects, fight sound effects, and powerful combat sound effects, it delivers everything from raw realism to over-the-top cinematic action. With improved fidelity and greater variation than its predecessor CLOSE COMBAT, this collection gives sound designers production-ready audio for film, TV, and games.
From Realism to Cinematic ExaggerationDial in the tone you need with dedicated categories: Martial Arts, Grounded, Over The Top, and Gory. Whether it’s kung fu sound effects, karate sounds, or exaggerated wrestling hits, you can shift seamlessly from authentic to stylised.
Successor to Close CombatVIOLENT COMBAT builds on the legacy of CLOSE COMBAT with higher fidelity recordings, better-organised categories, and more variation. It’s the ideal companion, giving you the flexibility to cover every style of fight scene.
Sounds That Land With ForceRecorded with a wide range of props and techniques, each fighting sound effect has real weight. Where needed, selective pre-processing boosts impact, avoiding the flat results of real fight recordings.
Production-Ready and VersatileEqually at home in film, TV drama, high-end game audio, or immersive theatre. From knockout sound effects to stylised fight sequences, Violent Combat is ready to drop straight into your mix.
Included Sounds – KEYWORDS
AIR, BODYFALL, CLOTH, CRUNCH, FINISHER, FURNITURE, GORE, GRAB, GRAPPLE, IMPACT, KICK, LEATHER, MARTIAL ARTS, METAL, MOVEMENT, PLASTIC, PUNCH, SLAP, SWISH, SWOOSH, THROW, WHOOSH
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638 meticulously processed stereo fire spells sound effects recorded in 96 khz and 24 bits for high audio definition.
The collection comes with hundreds of variations, more than 1 hour of content and many different type of fire spells. It also includes source sounds for more flexibility for your projects.
This collection is perfect for any films, video games or trailers.
The library is fully focused on fire spells. You will find simple one shot magic firebolt, powerful high level fire spells, fire sword, berserker enchantments and so on. Spells such as fireball, firewall, rain of fire, meteor, fire nova, magma storm, pyroblast, sword of Avernus, etc. are included in this library.
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