Asbjoern Andersen


This is Part 2 of a guest blog post by sound designer Mark Camperell, Founder & Creative Director at Empty Sea Audio and its sister company, The Library by Empty Sea:

In Part 1, Mark shared his tips on how to come up with ideas for your new library, and finding great material to record. In this second part, he takes a look at post processing your sounds, and the things you have to consider when pricing your work:

 

Post process

Just as daunting as the recording process is the post process.

Most often times, this takes longer than the actual recording time. My go to steps are as follows:

1: Group related sounds on their own track. This will make your editing, processing and naming much easier from the start.

2: Listen to your raw material and reject any sound that doesn’t fit or doesn’t meet with your standards. You have to put on your customer hat. If you don’t like it, chances are someone else won’t like it either.

3: Your sounds should be cleaned from any pops, clicks and mic bumps. Top and tail your files to the first and last modulation so that you’re keeping file size to a minimum. If you tout the physical size of your collections when you advertise, your customers will thank you for not charging them for extraneous megabytes of silence.

If you need to improve your signal to noise ratio, do it in a way that’s transparent and that won’t detract from your recording.

EQ to taste to accentuate the interesting parts of the sound. Compress if needed to beef up a sound. Don’t brick the stuff, leave that to your customer. Some of us like to have dynamic range to play with when we design! Master your files so that categories of sounds are playing back at a similar perceived loudness and timbre. I try to have sounds playback at a level that makes sense for what it is. Foley gear doesn’t need to be mastered to -1db seeing as it’s usually going to be playing back well below that. Tire squeals on the other hand could be mastered to -1db no problem.

4: Name your files in a way that makes sense and makes it easy to search/sort.
I personally use a “collection_object_action_#” method. There are a million ways to name and organize your files. Pick one that works for your collection that you are comfortable with.

5: Finally… metadata. If you don’t know what metadata is, you should take the time to do some research. There are a lot of great articles out there about metadata. I suggest those written by Tim Prebble.

Most sound designers HATE when a library they just spent good money on doesn’t come with embedded metadata.

Metadata is quite powerful and it makes the library experience so much more enjoyable when the embedded metadata is well grounded.

Most sound designers HATE when a library they just spent good money on doesn’t come with embedded metadata.

It makes the investment harder to use because you end up spending so much time figuring out what each sound is and categorizing it yourself. Without naming naming names, there are some notable offenders out there that do not include this stuff. While they have great sounds, I find myself using them less and less because they’re less efficient to search.
 

Sell, sell, sell

I get a lot of questions about how I come up with a price for an individual collection.

Without getting too much into economics and supply & demand, this section should help you price your products.

Usually what I do is start by looking at comparable products that are available. This gives me a good baseline. Next, I look at my obvious costs. Did I have to pay for access to the item? Did I have to rent or purchase any specific gear for this collection? These are things that should be built into the price.

You should take into account the uniqueness of the collection also. If you were able to get access to something quite rare, then the price should reflect the scarcity of the item that you are recording.

The other thing to factor in is how much time you spent on the collection.
All-in if you spent 40 hours on it, price the collection so that 5 or 6 sales cover your 40 hours.

Make the lean times less lean by creating a passive income stream.

You don’t want to have to sell 300 copies just to make your rate on the time you put in.
My goal with selling sound effects packs is to make the lean times less lean by creating a passive income stream.

The quicker you can break even on a collection, the quicker you start realizing the benefits of passive income.

There are some costs associated with selling your packs beyond just the time you spend and gear required.

You have to have a web shop set up to sell the stuff so there could be web/graphic design fees. Hosting costs money. You’ll need to set up a merchant account so you can address issues like accepting credit cards, Paypal, worldwide currency among other concerns. A merchant account will take a small percentage on every transaction, price accordingly.

Additional things to think about… Your website may be hosted on servers located in Colorado or Texas. Your customer might be in the Czech Republic. To ensure reliable transfers for large files and fast rates of data transfer, you might want to consider placing your product with a worldwide storage service. Your product will be securely stored on redundant servers around the world and they will use the most efficient one for transfer to your customer.

You’ll pay a few bucks a month to store and a few bucks per transfer for a service like this, but I assure you that your customers will be thankful that your 3GB collection of sounds won’t take three days to download.

In the end, you aren’t really selling sound effects. You’re selling a license to use your sound effects.

I would encourage you to talk to an attorney or use a legal service like Legal Zoom for getting an End User License Agreement for your sound packs. You want to protect yourself and your intellectual property from those that are looking to take advantage.

Among other things, your EULA should be clear in how your customer is allowed to use the sounds that are purchased.

It should also be clear as to how many customers are allowed to use the collection per purchase. You really should have two license agreements. One for single user and one for multiple users.
 

Conclusion

Don’t expect to pull in thousands of dollars immediately with your first sound pack, especially if you are currently toiling in relative obscurity. Ben Burtt could probably rake it in with his very first pack, you probably will not.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try!

It may take a few collections before you start seeing profits. If you use your collections as a way to fill holes in your schedule you’ll start to have more and more offerings.

Having a diverse portfolio of products gives you more credibility. If your products are high quality and contain unique sounds people will start to notice.

Try giving away a few free copies to trusted friends, colleagues or people whose work you admire. They’ll use your sounds on projects and your stuff will be heard. Their colleagues might take notice and inquire where the sounds came from.

Word of mouth is very powerful. The more people that are familiar with your product, the more apt you are to sell it or other products. You never know who is looking for exactly what you are selling.

This could be a chance for you to try new things you haven’t tried before. You could use it as a personal showcase for your abilities beyond the usual projects you encounter. Maybe you’ve been pigeon holed into weapons or vehicles on your last three jobs.

Releasing a sound pack could give you a chance to show what you can do with creatures or environments.

Remember, make it something you’d want to purchase yourself. And, most of all have fun with it! No one tells us to “SHHHHHHH” so why not get out there and make some noise?

 

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About Mark Camperell:

Mark Camperell is the Founder & Creative Director at Empty Sea Audio and its sister company,
The Library by Empty Sea. Mark’s direction, along with his ability to assemble uniquely talented audio teams, is positioning Empty Sea as a leader in creative audio services ranging from sound effects libraries to original music composition to full service post audio packages. In addition to his position at Empty Sea, Mark is also a freelance Supervising Sound Designer, Re-Recording Mixer and Music Producer with over 100 titles under his belt. Mark is an active member of the Motion Picture Sound Editors and Motion Picture Editors Guild.

The Library by Empty Sea:

  • Drones & Mood Sound Effects Dronos Play Track 154 sounds included, 154 mins total $30

    Brand New Sci-Fi Ambiences from The Library by Empty Sea. 6+ GB, 150+ sounds, almost 3 hours of material, all 96k, all looped for easy use.

  • Tired of those same old door knobs and hinge squeaks that you hear in every single game, film and TV show? Well, Gateway aims to remedy that issue while providing you with a brand new palette of sounds.

    Gateway comes packed with doors, doors and more doors! Low end, high end, slow horror creaks and squeaks, huge slams and impacts, tiny compartment doors.

    The Gateway family now includes the just-released Gateway Part 3, with more than 1400 new sounds.

    Doors, gates, overhead rollups, cabinets, closets, drawers, garage doors, fireplaces, sheds, you name it!

    Latches and knobs, wrought iron and chain link! Metal, wood, glass and MORE! All of these doors were acoustically captured in the real world. You won’t find anything synthesized here!

    Did we mention doors? Yeah, Gateway has those too.

    Gateway Part 1 features 675 files, 1200+ sounds

    Gateway Part 2 features 365 files, 600+ sounds

    Gateway Part 3 features 772 files, 1400+ sounds

    The Gateway 1-3 Bundle features 1812 files, 3200+ sounds

    Special offer:Do you already have Gateway Part 1 or 2? Send a message here for a special upgrade offer for part 3.

    Choose your preferred version below – or land some great savings by getting all three in one handy package!

  • Robobiotics is an exciting new sound effects collection from The Library by Empty Sea. It delivers 3600+ original sound effects for scifi and robots. We’re talking about almost 3 hours of material here.

    We spent over a year recording and designing Lasers, Robot Vox, Impacts, Servos, Ratcheting Metal, Ambiances, Transformations, Foley, Vehicle Bys and much much more!

  • Sea Monsters from The Library by Empty Sea is a collection containing over 4000 sound effects for creature vocals. This collection weighs in at a whopping 9GB!

    A must-have for any sound designer looking to level up on creature sound design.

  • The Roll from The Library by Empty Sea contains over 750 original Wheeled Object sound effects for all your rolling needs!

    We set out to record objects that roll in a similar manner to how one would record cars. With multiple tracks recording simultaneously and synced to one another, intercutting between perspectives has never been easier. Onboards, Passbys, Cornering. Some of the objects were even loaded down with weight to change the sonic profile! It’s all here! Toy Cars, Strollers, Wagons, Scooters, Luggage, Carts, Hand Truck. Part 1 has a great selection of rolling objects for all of your sound design needs.

    The Roll was recorded exclusively at 96k24bit. We utilized several different recorders and microphones for this project including Zoom F8n, Roland R-07, Zoom H4n, and Oktava MK-012. The Roll also utilizes UCS for easier cataloging in sound effect database management software.

  • Looking for authentic ambient sounds of Japanese transportation? Look no further! Field recordist and composer Ryan Ayers travelled to Japan in April of 2019 and captured this wonderful collection. His journey took him from Osaka to Tokyo to Fukuoka and all points in-between. Travel aboard the trains of the JR, the famous Shinkansen, the Hanyu Ferry and more! Explore the train platforms and station terminals of Osaka. Get lost in the Kansai International Airport. There is a subway noodle shop as well as specialty food markets. Authentic walla and natural activity give this collection the ear candy necessary to be an integral part of great soundscapes.

    This is a purely recorded sound pack. Nothing is synthetic or layered here. What you hear is exactly what was captured on location. We edited and mastered the files to bring out the best parts of the recordings. Most of the recordings have been ready-made into loops for ease of use. As always, we have embedded the files with detailed metadata for easy database searches.

  • This collection contains over 1400 original sound effects for user interfaces, telemetry, gadgetry and more.

  • User Interface (UI) Sound Effects Ui Two Play Track 377 sounds included $45

    Ui Two is the sequel to our overwhelming popular Ui One collection, this collection contains 377 original sounds uniquely crafted for creating user interfaces, telemetry, gadgetry and more.

    Empty Sea’s Mark Camperell, carefully crafted these sounds using a variety of beepers, boopers and other sonic tools. A sample of which include synths, samplers, spectral editors and more. Each sound was recorded at 48k/24bit. Planned, processed, mangled and otherwise destroyed, every single tone was tweaked until it was something new, original, and exciting.

    As usual, we meticulously edited, mastered and embedded the files with metadata. This collection is priced to move, so don’t hesitate. If you’re tired of the your same old UI inspiration, Ui Two from The Library by Empty Sea is a great addition to your library.


 

   
 
 
THE WORLD’S EASIEST WAY TO GET INDEPENDENT SOUND EFFECTS:
 
A Sound Effect gives you easy access to an absolutely huge sound effects catalog from a myriad of independent sound creators, all covered by one license agreement - a few highlights:

  • Animal Sound Effects Animal Hyperrealism Vol III Play Track 1711 sounds included $170

    Animal Hyperrealism Vol III is a library containing sounds themed animal vocalisations, from real to designed creatures totaling more than 1700 individual sounds in 279 files.

    The sounds were recorded in zoos and wildlife centers. The asset list includes but is not limited to: european red deers, monkeys, reindeers, hornbills camels, crickets, tamarins, boars, frogs, red ruffed lemurs, parrots, and many more.

    The content has been recorded at 192KHz with a Sanken CO100K plus a Sennheiser 8050 for center image and a couple of Sennheiser MKH8040 for stereo image.
    Part of the cheats section of the library features samples recorded at 384KHz. For these sounds an additional microphone was employed, specifically the CMPA by Avisoft-Bioacoustics which records up to 200 KHz. This microphone was used to record most of the library but the 384KHz format was preserved only where energy was found beyond 96KHz not to occupy unnecessary disk space.
    All files are delivered as stereo bounce of these for mics, though in some instances an additional couple of CO100K was added to the sides.
    The resulting ultrasonic spectrum is rich and allows for truly extreme manipulation of the content.

    Bonus: Two extra libraries included for free:
    This library also includes two additional releases from Mattia Cellotto - for free: Crunch Mode delivers 230 crunchy sounds made with a variety of vegetables, fresh bread, pizza crust and a selection of frozen goods. The Borax Experiment gets you 158 squishy, gory, slimy and gooey sounds.
  • Spell Variations Vol. 3 brings a fresh wave of magical creativity and sonic variety. This collection dives deep into the mystical realm, offering everything from shimmering chime spells and celestial choirs, to demonic voices that feel torn from the depths of hell, along with earth-based magic, electric spells, powerful invocations, and more.

    Inside, you’ll find 247 sound effects across 27 distinct types of magic, each with multiple variations. As with our previous volumes, these variations ensure each spell feels unique, even when reused throughout different moments in your project.

    Each spell type is neatly organized into individual folders, giving you total flexibility when designing magical scenes, gameplay effects, or transitions. Whether you need a subtle magical aura or a powerful blast, you’ll have the perfect sound at your fingertips.

    All sounds were recorded, edited, and mastered at 192 kHz / 24-bit, delivering high-end quality and broad adaptability. This library is perfect for professional sound designers and creators looking for high-quality, drag-and-drop magical sounds for games, trailers, animations, or any audiovisual production.

    More about the pack
    . Intuitive file naming
    . All you’ll ever need regarding magical sounds [Use them again & again
    . Use the sound effects over and over, in any of your projects or productions, forever without any additional fees or royalties. Use the SFX in your game, in your trailer, in a Kickstarter
    campaign, wherever you need to, as much as you want to.
    . Totally mono compatibility
    . All sounds have several variations.
    . Use your imagination and feel free to use any sound for a creature other than the one described, remember that the world of sound is totally subjective.
    . For any questions or problems: khronstudio@gmail.com

    Khron Studio - Spells Variations Vol 3
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  • ‘Tiny Transitions’ deivers 275 short Whooshes and other Transition sounds. Instead of the huge, more cinematic transitional sounds that you are accustomed to hear from SoundBits, this sound pack focuses more on the smaller, not-so-intrusive production elements that come in very handy for any Sound Designer, All-In-One Film Editor or Web-, App- and Game-Developers.

    All these small motion-supporting elements that you need in your everyday work for game menus, apps, general motion designs, … or as parts of more complex moving stuff.

    You get 275 designed sounds + a selection of 290 cleaned and edited source sounds that were used to design the Tiny Transitions. These sounds are mostly different props that are scraping or sliding on different surfaces and also some vocalized whoosh attempts.

    All source sounds were recorded with Sonosax SX-R4+ and Sennheiser MKH8050+MKH30 M/S rig.

    All sounds come with embedded Soundminer Metadata.

    50 %
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Explore the full, unique collection here

Latest sound effects libraries:
 
  • Enhance your game with the UI Menu RPG Sound Effects Pack, featuring 174 carefully designed sound effects. Created for high-quality user interface interactions, this pack includes sounds for select, deny, and access actions, perfect for RPGs and other genres. But these versatile effects go beyond just menus—they can be used to elevate action, skills, magic, combat, motion, and more. Whether you’re building intricate gameplay systems or immersive user interfaces, this extensive collection offers the dynamic, rich sounds you need to bring your project to life.

    Features:

    •  174 universal user interface sounds for any type of game
    • High-quality sounds for the most commonly used categories
    • Can be used not only for UI, but perfect for any genre
  • Elevate your game with this Transmission/Glitchy sound effects pack, designed to add a dynamic, futuristic edge to your project. Perfect for enhancing the user experience, these high-quality, glitch-inspired sounds are ideal for creating technical malfunctions, digital disturbances, or sci-fi-themed environments. Whether you’re working on a cyberpunk game, a tech-heavy adventure, or any project in need of glitchy, electronic audio, this pack will help you immerse your audience with compelling, atmospheric effects that bring your digital world to life.

    Features:

    •  Transmissions
    •  Glitches
  • Environments & Ambiences Fantasy Jungle Ambiences Play Track 18 sounds included, 60 mins total $17.99

    Enter the mystical heart of an ancient, otherworldly wilderness with Fantasy Jungle — a curated collection of 18 designed stereo ambience tracks, totaling 1 hour, 31 minutes, and 41 seconds of immersive fantasy jungle soundscapes.

    Each track is a richly textured sonic environment where strange birds call from the treetops, mysterious creatures chirp and chatter in the shadows, and the soothing sounds of flowing water, rustling leaves, and gentle winds form a vivid natural backdrop. This ambience set is ideal for adding depth and life to fantasy worlds, game environments, audio dramas, or creative writing sessions.

    Crafted with care and detail, all files are delivered in high-quality stereo WAV format, with embedded metadata for easy organization and integration into your workflow.

    Product Features:

    ·          18 stereo WAV files

    ·          Total runtime: 1:31:41

    ·          Fantasy wildlife & jungle ambience – strange birds, unknown creatures, wind, and water

    ·          Metadata embedded for seamless library management

    ·          Loopable-friendly for continuous playback

    ·          Perfect for RPGs, games, film, podcasting, and immersive storytelling

    Let Fantasy Jungle breathe life into your magical worlds — where every chirp, breeze, and ripple tells a story beyond the veil of the ordinary.

  • Household Sound Effects Extra Coins Play Track 179 sounds included, 24 mins total $9.99

    EXTRA COINS – is an auxiliary sound library containing 179 unique sound effect files of real metal coins. From spare change and coin sacks to individual coins being handled and dropped. Whether it’s metallic clanking and ringing or the old familiar sound of a hand full of coins you’re looking for; This Extra sound effects library will help supplement any of your coin money needs, for your next project. Extra Coins comes in at over 24 minutes and was recorded at 192kHz / 32bit using an ultrasonic microphone. All of our libraries comply with the Universal Category System naming convention standard, allowing for accurate and easy granular searches.

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  • All files are recorded 32bit, 192 kHz, with RØDE NTG1, Line Audio Omni1 and FEL Clippy XLR EM272 microphones, Sound Devices MixPre-6 II recorder. Library contains wav files of driving, interior and exterior foley, mechanical and electrical sounds. It is also available in UCS.

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