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Best Sound Design / Foley Companies?

ryanstrong

ryanstrong

Senior Member
Hey all, I’m wanting to know what the best sound design / foley library companies that are out there that sell the highest quality packs or libraries or however they are packaged?

Like what’s the Spitfire / Orchestral Tools of the foley world? I don’t even know where to start?

Looking for like ambient sounds (nature, small room, gym sounds), car sounds, walking sounds, clock sounds etc.

Would be nice to know what is then the “Albion” product of that world? Like what is a pack that broad strokes across the major areas of foley / sound design.
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Pro Sound Effects.

Sound Dogs.

Freesound.org (You would be amazed what you can find here. Slap it through Izotope RX to clean up anything you dislike and keep rolling).

I would also recommend getting a small hand held recorder like a H6 or a tascam--whatever floats your boat-- and record your own stuff. You can even use your smartphone, I have.

No matter what you end up doing, I would always have the Izotope RX suite. That thing has paid for itself over and over, even in regular recording session scenarios.
 
Red Libraries

Sound Ideas

All of these have different bundles and options available.

Pro Sound Effects is kind of the standard go-to library; however, their contractor bundle--the hybrid library--is a little pricey for a pro-sumer. They do offer smaller bundles of sounds etc. These companies, especially Pro Sound Effects, always have spring and summer sales. My email inbox can attest to that :(. They also have a monthly subscription for x-amount of sounds from their library depending on the tier. You can also purchase individual sounds.

Regarding Pro Sound Effects Sub individual sound purchasing model, here is my advice: find the sounds that you want, subscribe for a month, purchase and unlock them to your account, use up your credits, and then unsubscribe. When you unsubscribe, you keep access to every sound that has been credited to your account, and you can redownload them whenever; it is not like you are losing anything. When you want more sounds, do it again; this will save you a decent amount of money if there are specific things that catch your ears. That said, if you unsubscribe with unused credits to your account, these will terminate upon the cancellation of your subscription, so just make sure you use them up before doing so. If you stay subscribed to them, unused credits roll over to the following months.
 
ryanstrong said:
This looks great. Man wish they had a “best of” library. Don’t think I need $200 of just dogs. Need $300 of a little bit of everthing.
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Check out their trailer effects libraries. They're a little more focused toward impacts, booms , wooshes, risers, etc. but they've got a wider array of stuff.
 
Brian Nowak said:
Check out their trailer effects libraries. They're a little more focused toward impacts, booms , wooshes, risers, etc. but they've got a wider array of stuff.
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Yeah don’t need wooshbangs and downers, got that covered. Just need real world sounds.
 
Piano Pete said:
Regarding Pro Sound Effects Sub individual sound purchasing model, here is my advice: find the sounds that you want, subscribe for a month, purchase and unlock them to your account, use up your credits, and then unsubscribe. When you unsubscribe, you keep access to every sound that has been credited to your account, and you can redownload them whenever; it is not like you are losing anything. When you want more sounds, do it again; this will save you a decent amount of money if there are specific things that catch your ears. That said, if you unsubscribe with unused credits to your account, these will terminate upon the cancellation of your subscription, so just make sure you use them up before doing so. If you stay subscribed to them, unused credits roll over to the following months.
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Thank you for the tip.
 
Like the sounds of nature and city scapes and stuff. I think they're more geared toward people who need a ton of options on a consistent basis: game sound design, videos, etc. I meant like dudes who would need 15 gigs of train noises.
 
Brian Nowak said:
Like the sounds of nature and city scapes and stuff. I think they're more geared toward people who need a ton of options on a consistent basis: game sound design, videos, etc. I meant like dudes who would need 15 gigs of train noises.
Click to expand...
Right yeah got it.
 
it is almost impossible to go wrong with Sound Ideas libraries as a starting point. Heck they have the deep libraries too. They aren't the only game in town, but for starters (a little bit of everything) they are a great value.
 
Tried all of the above, as a long time sound designer for films I can only recommend the last one, asoundeffect.com

Listen to the demos since the quality varies, but the prices are very reasonable, they come from many independent designers, and the selection is huge. They also have sales often. $200-300 will go a lot farther.
 
ryanstrong said:
Hey all, I’m wanting to know what the best sound design / foley library companies that are out there that sell the highest quality packs or libraries or however they are packaged?

Like what’s the Spitfire / Orchestral Tools of the foley world? I don’t even know where to start?

Looking for like ambient sounds (nature, small room, gym sounds), car sounds, walking sounds, clock sounds etc.

Would be nice to know what is then the “Albion” product of that world? Like what is a pack that broad strokes across the major areas of foley / sound design.
Click to expand...

its somewhat of a different world. "sound ideas" comes to mind. but there are so many that live outside of themainstream world that we would know of in this forum. boom! seems its one of the few thats being relying heavily on marketing and also do music related products. but i dont think they have as many as sound ideas or other older companies.
but i have sound ideas, bbc, warner, hollywood edge , sony, and just so many more. and each has so many sounds and yet, everytime i take on a project i find myself needing more :/

I think there are sites where you can just search and buy specific sounds. that might be a better option if its small project one offs. the big library big brush type of thing might give you way too many unusable sounds.

as for foley foosteps, that mgiht be separate as ive seen some very cool footstep libraries for kontakt that have not been part of the normal companies. kontakt or finger foley as its called is very frown upon audio post guys and they regard foley "Artist" in high esteem. i
 
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I like Tonsturm a lot. Quality over quantity: They have few but well produced sample libraries in different categories: Fire, explosions, wind, gore, glass, vibrations, electricity, etc.

They record everything themselves and are not a storefront for other random library producers. They list what mics etc they used to record each library, and everything is in 96kHz/24 bit quality.

They record mostly in stereo but have some LCR and surround stuff as well. Some libraries you can choose to pay more and get all surround recordings, or pay less and just get stereo mixdowns of the surround recordings, so that you only pay for what you need.

All Wav sounds are tagged with metadata ready for use in Soundminer, Protools, Basehead, etc.

https://tonsturm.com/
 
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