NI's sounds.com to go end of life

[emptyvessel]

I've had my sounds.com account for quite a lot of years and for various reasons I never ended up uploading any samples to sell. I just got an email to say that they're retiring the service. I won't paste the whole lot because, as I (somewhat vaguely) recall I signed an NDA and who knows what I agreed to, I really can't remember. But anyway:

"We’re writing to let you know that we will be retiring service on sounds.com on June 30th, 2023. We would like to thank you for your partnership in our mission to provide high quality, royalty free sample content to music makers.

Since 2018 we have worked together to launch over 18,000 releases with more than 1.8 million samples. We greatly appreciate your commitment to delivering quality products as we strived to serve the music creator community. Though we are moving on from sounds.com, our teams will continue to leverage our partner network to create Native Instruments products including Play Series, Expansions and future platforms."

Was it a popular platform? I'm fairly surprised given the weight of who was behind it and the fact that they had hardware that integrated with the store so you could just grab stuff for your Maschine, from your Maschine. Seemed like a nice way to encourage people to buy their samples from you if it worked nicely.
Maybe Splice and Loopcloud are just dominating?
Anyhoo, there it is. No more sounds.com.

Click to read more...

 

[José Herring]

Never heard of it. Maybe that's why it's closing. Not a lot of PR about it.

 

[MaschineMind]

I vaguely remember when they set this up, they were trying to push the Stems format for Traktor but it never really went anywhere. Guess it became a regular sample storefront?

 

[realstrings]

Yeah, I got that email. I submitted a small amount of material at the start. As my content was strings, I was disappointed that a search for that term threw up loads of string loops played on samples. I'm not convinced the user content model will work without some curation.

 

[Nashi_VI]

Actually sad, they had a tons of good collabs, like the JXL ones for example, and i did find that, at least at the beginning (i have not used either Sounds, Loopcloud or Splice for years at this point)the quality of the sounds were pretty good in my opinion, even better than a lot of other similar services, and they had a tons of cinematic sounds in there.

 

[Digivolt]

Just like Metapop they did absolutely no advertising for it, or if they did, it certainly wasn't noticeable so it's no wonder it didn't really grow and they had to close it down

 

[emptyvessel]

I vaguely remember when they set this up, they were trying to push the Stems format for Traktor but it never really went anywhere. Guess it became a regular sample storefront?

yeah it's been going for quite a while, I think I originally was given my account at least 7 years ago but you don't really see it discussed that much. If I'm reading the email correctly the site itself seems like it'll continue but not with user uploaded samples, just expansions created or curated by NI and they can push those directly to Maschine/KK owners.
Splice seems to be managing fine with user uploaded samples, I've no idea if they have any sort of quality control.

Actually sad, they had a tons of good collabs, like the JXL ones for example, and i did find that, at least at the beginning (i have not used either Sounds, Loopcloud or Splice for years at this point)the quality of the sounds were pretty good in my opinion, even better than a lot of other similar services, and they had a tons of cinematic sounds in there.

I get the impression those curated collabs will continue so the service is becoming much more like Arturia's expansion store, or I guess many other services controlled directly by the manufacturer/developer.

 

[k4music]

I have purchased so many samples from them. and now as they are retiring I want to download all my samples one last time. but there is no option. I am very much dissapointed.

 

[davidson]

I wonder what'll happen to their sample library, it's pretty damn sizeable.

 

[Ben H]

Looks like they are going to integrate in directly into Kontakt as a shop. :/

 

[emptyvessel]

I wonder what'll happen to their sample library, it's pretty damn sizeable.

afaik their own expansions and ones they have curated will continue to be available and new ones will appear, it's only the Splice-like 3rd party uploaded packs that they're putting a stop to.