New sound effects: High voltage, glacier ice, cardboard, rivers – and bears:

Warning: Do not try to create this library at home — unless you have all the proper equipment, experts and insurance! Rick Allen from Rick Allen Creative created this extremely useful library 'Sparks N Arcs' using industrial welders, Taser guns, Van Der Graph generators and a custom Jacob’s Ladder to produce electrical arcs, shorts, snaps, hums, sizzles, sparks and more. He even electrocuted a pickle to create those difficult to find (or emulate) sounds for your sound design. With over 200 sounds of 12,000-volt power, this is a hard library to pass up.

Mattia Cellotto went all out to create this diverse library of ice sounds. 'Glacier Ice’ contains 300+ sounds from every frozen scenario imaginable — crackling hollow ice and river surfaces, exploding ice blocks, falling chunks of various sizes, swirling ice cubes, collapsing icebergs, massive avalanches, underwater sounds, and a horrific sled hammer as it's dragged across the surface. Mattia recorded the entire library in the Italian Alps over two winters, and at 192 kHz, this library can be manipulated for the most dramatic of scenes. For ready-to-go ice sounds, check out this high-quality collection.

I don’t know about you, but I prefer to get my bear sounds from the professionals. 'Bears' is a collection of two volumes from Sounddogs, which includes brown bears, Kodiak bears, Himalayan bears, pandas, bear cubs and more. These sounds are perfect for monster and creature design, subliminal intensity, or when you just need a plain old bear roar. They contain close and distant individual roars, whines, calls, begs, sniffs, smacks and yelps, as well as groups of bears as they interact. With 163 files, this library should have all the Ursidae you need.

'Water Flow' isn’t just the white noise you listen to while you sleep (though many of the tracks are very soothing). This library by Soundholder contains 90 recordings from rivers, streams, dams, underground sewers and even bathtubs to cover your trickling needs. It has a variety of perspectives with close, medium and far distances as well as XY, M10, MS and ORTF recordings, enabling it to fit just about every scenario. The team also recorded the sounds during the chilly dawns of winter to offer tracks clean of birds which so often plague nature recordings. For a clean, flexible library flowing with possibility, this is the library to listen to.

The folks at Double Trouble Audio would like to share with you their secret weapon: cardboard foley! 'Punchy Cardboard' contains a wide variety of sounds from this thick paper product with heavy punches, juicy rips, crackling white noise, squeaky friction, squishes, thuds and more. These sounds don’t just meet the needs of literal foley, they can be used for fights, crashes and explosions when manipulated or added as layers. With 400 hand-picked sounds, this library will give your sound design something it may have never contained before.