I made a library in a day (almost)

After spending over a year working the Future UI sound library, I decided to challenge myself.

The challenge: complete a sound library in a day.

Floppy Disk is that library.

What follows is a bit of a stream of consciousness account of the process of making the library (and sound libraries generally).

Well, to be fair, I kinda cheated. I'd already recorded and edited the sounds for a game project I'd contributed to earlier in the year (Cerebrate, a neat circuitboard simulator and puzzle game), and with the blessing of the developer (as a courtesy),  set about curating the best sounds for release as a mini sound library.

In the day I gave myself to release the library I:

• Selected, named and organised the 200 or so sounds to be included in the library using the sound database software Soundminer.

• 'Remastered' these sounds, refining the audio clip start/ends and running them through a subtle mastering chain to improve their quality and clarity.

• Designed the cover image (sometimes this can take days alone).

• Made a preview audio track.

• Wrote product copy and uploaded images, the preview track and the product itself.

• Poured a refreshing glass of iced coffee knowing I'd completed the challenge*
  (* except for the bit where I cheated and did most of the work beforehand)

The recording and editing process probably took another handful of hours but all in all not a bad attempt at producing a library quickly.

Of course pure foley/recorded libraries require far less work than libraries like Future UI where everything is designed and synthesised from scratch, and often a single sound is actually many layers of original material combined, and then naming sounds that don't exist in reality is a whole other thing. What do you call an invented sound that goes "biiiewwooww-zzchht-bing!!" and could be used in many contexts? That's the sort of thing I asked myself 800 times over when working on Future UI, so it was nice to be able to name files "Floppy disk drop" "Insert floppy disk into drive" and so on to give my noggin' a rest.

How the library was recorded and edited

Not long ago I invested in a Rode PSA1+ studio boom arm for one of my Sennheiser MKH8040’s (or whichever other mic I decide to stick in it). It was one of the best purchase decisions I’ve made: always having a mic hooked up and ready to go is so much better than having to set up a separate floor stand, find a suitable spot for it, plug a long enough cable in at both ends and so on. Sure, not the worst, but when a flash of inspiration strikes it’s amazing to be able to just fire up Reaper and hit record.

Generally I try to record similar sounds in the one file. That is, hit record, perform one set of similar sounds (dropping a floppy disk on a bench, for example). Then stop recording before repeating the process on another set of sounds. This way when I bring the file in for editing I know what all the sounds are, can process them similarly, and name and organise them more easily.

I kept processing relatively minimal, but I do like to slightly enhance the source recordings a bit: some Acon Digital Noise Reduction (underrated noise reduction plugin that works wonders) if the material being recorded is very quiet, a Pro-Q EQ curve that lifts some of the higher frequencies the 8040 is known to roll off, potentially some subtle Soothe to refine the sound a little if need be, maybe a pinch of downward expansion or reverb suppression, a bit of saturation with Saturn or multi-band dynamics mixed in very slightly (OTT, of course), and finally some clipped waveshaping to ahem inflate the sound and Pro-L on the master to catch any stray peaks.

I then render these adjustments to audio, and use Reaper’s auto-slice-up-the-sample-into-individual-samples function (ok so I forget what it’s called), normalise these based on RMS (doesn’t work so well for very short sounds though) and sort the files by length, shortest to longest, which is a cinch with Reaper’s massive array of scripts.

Then the process repeats more or less for other sets of recorded sounds, each on their own layer in Reaper, until all files are processed and cut up.

Then I render the media items out using $folder/$trackname_$itemnumber to magically spit the files out nice and neatly organised into folders of like content.

From here, the files get popped into Soundminer for the addition of metadata.

Then it’s all zipped up along with any documentation and away we go!