Sound Effect Packs

[simonbowerbank]

Hi, some of you might have seen my thread in the portfolios section. I recently set up a site, Echophile Studios (http://www.echophile.com) selling packs of royalty free sound effects and have been making various packs inbetween projects.

I was just wondering, what kind of packs would you as game developers be interested in buying? Would you want them to be small and specific or large and vague, what kind of packs, what information you would want before you purchase the product.

Another thing im quite worried about is the quality of the demos for each product, i think they are too low quality for people to hear how good they are but im not sure if raising the quality is such a wise idea.

All feedback would be appreciated.

[Reactor]

I don't buy sound packs myself (I have a base set of sounds on CD I edit myself) but I had a listen to what you have. One thing that stuck me was the names you had for each sample... they didn't seem to say enough about the sounds included. Considering you have the room to write up a decent description of each, you might want to look into doing that.

The quality of the examples seemed on par with what other guys have on their sites, so no complaint there.

[papillon]

I buy sounds, but I wouldn't buy the kind of sound packs those three seem to be, usually. I don't tend to see the need for 100 beeps. I'm much more likely to go and look for *a* beep. Or a themed pack that has multiple sounds that go together well. A pack with five beeps, five clicks, and five whooshes would be of much more interest to me than fifteen beeps.

Preview quality is always an issue - this was especially bad when I was looking for a coin jingle for my RPG recently, since the high-pitched metallic tones I was looking for are usually completely lost by reducing sound quality. Not being able to preview the FULL sound and not knowing if any of them would be the right kind of jingle, I had to resort to making it myself. For MOST sounds it's not that much of a problem.

I dislike mashed-into-one-file sound previews, because it's harder to tell what I get with each sound - it makes the whole feel more valuable if I can appreciate each sound individually.

I like theme sets... "Horror Sounds" "Sounds you are likely to use in a shmup" - even if I don't want all of them right away, they feel more useful to me presented in a themed pack than just in "101 Dings and Bleeps". I can more easily envision their use.

[ChilledOut]

Any time I've bought sounds it's always been for 1 particular sound. So the smaller the pack the better in my opinion. In fact I love the sites out there that let you purchase individual sounds.

I think a collection of interface sounds would be great. Effects for button rollovers, button clicks, wooshes for elements sliding around, etc.

Regarding in-game effects, one issue very specific to game developers is having variations on one sound. It would be useful to have a pack that had half a dozen slight variations on the same sound, so that every time I played that sound I could pick a random variation to play, in order to break up the repetitiveness.

[simonbowerbank]

I use shareit, which charges a minimum of $2.50 per sale. So selling individual sound effects isnt really an option using shareit. Does anyone know any similar companies to shareit that charge a percentage without a minimum amount per sale?

I think a collection of interface sounds would be great. Effects for button rollovers, button clicks, wooshes for elements sliding around, etc.

Thats basicaly what the 101 beeps and click pack is minus the slider whooshes.


I will add more descriptions for each file, put in previews for each individual file and look into finding somewhere that i can viably sell individual sound effects.

I was thinking about putting in an input area where you can request a pack to be made for something. That way the customer would get a large discount and i would have a pack that would potentialy sell to other likeminded people. What do you think?

[soniCron]

I use shareit, which charges a minimum of $2.50 per sale. So selling individual sound effects isnt really an option using shareit. It is if you require a minimum number of samples to be bought.

[simonbowerbank]

I dont know if you can combine multiple products and only get charged for selling them as one. Ill look into it though

[Sybixsus]

Same as Papillon for me. I do buy sounds, but I usually have a theme or idea in mind. 101 clicks and beeps is probably 99 clicks and beeps I don't want, and a couple hours going through them over and over to decide which are the two that I want and that go together. Themed packs would be much more interesting for me.

[Davaris]

I would never by a sound pack as I like to sift through all the sounds and find the exact ones I need.

[simonbowerbank]

Yeah im going ot try and work out a way to sell individual sound effects. I have masses of sound effects i could put up there that i havnt because they dont fit into the theme of a pack.

The problem is finding a way to sell them. I was thinking about using paypal, does anyone know of any better alternatives?

[mj32]

Maybe worth doing something along the lines of the www.soundrangers.com site, there you can preview and buy single samples.

We have bought several there as its so simple to find the one you need online there and then.

[Omega]

Wrong forum

[simonbowerbank]

Why? The Sticky thread says to discuss related topics such as Sales, Serving customers, Marketing, Publishing, Legal issues, Search engines, Download sites and Web hosting.

I started this thread to discuss Sales, Serving Customers and Marketing. I dont see whats wrong with that

[papillon]

He's just gone through and posted complaints to a bunch of threads; don't worry about it too much. If a mod decides this should be elsewhere, THEY can move it. :)

[ManuelMarino]

Ciao, I can help too if you need some sound work.

[Omega]

Why? The Sticky thread says to discuss related topics such as Sales, Serving customers, Marketing, Publishing, Legal issues, Search engines, Download sites and Web hosting.

I started this thread to discuss Sales, Serving Customers and Marketing. I dont see whats wrong with that

Uh, no, your post has nothing to do with that. It obviously belongs in the Technical Forum designed to "Discuss game development and technical topics, including programming, art, design, music, sound fx, web development, porting, localization, and hardware."

It was a pain in the butt to specifically visit the Business forum and see that the top four topics were about sound or languages. A business forum is for trademark questions, advertising, marketing, promotion, etc--which just happens to be exactly what the IndieGamer Business Forum is for as well (trademarks are "Legal issues", advertising is "Marketing", etc.) I didn't set the rules, the mods did. Just because they aren't here 24/7 doesn't mean we should allow this site to degenerate to a complete waste. There's a reason we have so many subsections now instead of one.

[simonbowerbank]

This forum is for discussing topics such as "Sales, Serving customers, Marketing, Publishing, Legal issues, Search engines, Download sites and Web hosting"

I am discussing Sales, Serving Customers and Marketing. If you want this thread closed complain to an admin, otherwise stick to the topic.

[Jay_Kyburz]

I agree with the guys interested in packs of sounds.

Give me a medieval pack with a couple of hundred sounds I may or may not need in my medieval themed game. Clanks and chinks for buttons, coins and bags being droped, weapons clashing and hitting armor, arrows flying, footsteps and perhaps even a chicken and a cow.

I find it a real pain to go looking for individual sounds and would rather just buy a big wad that does everything I need for $50, then find a place for them in my game.

You could do any number of themes and there could be quite a bit of overlap.

For a preview, why not mock up some kind of game that illustrates the theme and include the sounds in the binary. A hacker could pull them out but it would stop the lazy man. If somebody really wanted them they could just buy a game that uses them and get them from there. I think it would be great to preview a sound for button pressing by actually pressing the button.

[soniCron]

I'm on the other side of the fence with this one. I could get a lot of use out of compartmentalized sound packs (ie. pack of buttons, pack of explosions, etc.). I find myself doing a wide variety of work and need a wide variety of effects. (I'm finishing off the 5th game now, and none have been similarly themed. And all but one have been mini-games, for you inquiring minds! ;))

However, the individual sample purchase is by far the best option, IMHO, and I've thought how you may accomplish something similar: a subscription model. Charge $19.99 per month for access to your library. Sure, some folks would sign up, download all the sounds, and not renew next month's subscription. But if you continually add new effects, perhaps charge a $10-20 setup fee, I can imagine it could be a nice service that sound designers from all walks would enjoy using. Of course, you'd have to keep the quantity and organization top notch, but it seems like it'd be well worth the shot.

[simonbowerbank]

Ok, this thread has been a lot of help. Can i ask one last thing? What sound effect packs or sound effects do you think people would most be looking for.

[papillon]

Zuma-clone sounds. :)

Just kidding! *I'm* not looking for them, at least.

[simonbowerbank]

Thanks to all your help i have redesigned the site completely to sell individual sound effects. What do you all think of it?

Also, what advice would you give as far as advertising goes?

[WaveRider]

It's a very nice looking site so far, I like the header image.

Just a head's up though... There is currently nothing in place to stop people from right clicking and saving the sound files to their computer without buying them.

I'm a fan of http://www.soundrangers.com .They use a cool little flash rollover method which I find easy to use and prevents theft. You might be able to get some ideas from there.

[simonbowerbank]

Those are previews and the quality is heavily reduced. If someone doesnt mind using sound effects that bad in their game i doubt they would want to buy any in the first place.

I had a go at putting flash buttons in and got completely stumped on embedding them into the php files. Also, it would mean having to create a seperate flash file for each sound effect which would be very annoying.

It wouldnt really solve much stopping them from downloading the demo files either, they could just as easily record the sound when it plays.

Also, even if they did use the sound effects without paying for them they wouldnt beable to use them in any commercial projects.
Previews are a bit of a dilema at the moment. I think the quality of them at the moment is far too low, you dont really get any indication of how good they are. But the more i raise the quality the less likely people are to purchase them.

[tafty]

Previews are a bit of a dilema at the moment. I think the quality of them at the moment is far too low, you dont really get any indication of how good they are. But the more i raise the quality the less likely people are to purchase them.

Why not offer one or two high quality effects for free so that people can hear the difference between the preview and actual effect?

Or once your portfolio of sounds increases in size (you have 40 available at the time of writing) offer an "Effect of the Month" to keep people coming back and checking out the site.

Though I guess the argument against this would be that at $1.50 you're hardly charging the earth for someone to see how good the real effect is.

[soniCron]

I didn't realize there was already a conversation about this when I responded to your other thread, so...

I had a go at putting flash buttons in and got completely stumped on embedding them into the php files. Also, it would mean having to create a seperate flash file for each sound effect which would be very annoying. Check the web. I'm sure there are ways to use a single Flash file to load any sound file you specify, since Flash can dynamically load media from an URL. And Flash will output the HTML you need to use to embed the file on your page.


It wouldnt really solve much stopping them from downloading the demo files either, they could just as easily record the sound when it plays. It is more of an effort, but you are right. Of course, as with any digital media, they'll get it if they want it.


Previews are a bit of a dilema at the moment. I think the quality of them at the moment is far too low, you dont really get any indication of how good they are. But the more i raise the quality the less likely people are to purchase them. Are you sure?

[simonbowerbank]

Ill definately try getting the flash buttons working, as for the quality of the previews im not sure. Do you think i can afford to make them higher quality or even full quality? (with flash buttons of course)

[soniCron]

Ill definately try getting the flash buttons working, as for the quality of the previews im not sure. Do you think i can afford to make them higher quality or even full quality? (with flash buttons of course) I couldn't tell you that. But, frankly, neither could you. You should do what Cas does: try several models to see which works best. If you can keep track of a user's uniqueness, then randomly choose between high quality and low quality samples. Over the space of some time, see how many of each class (high quality users/low quality users) purchase your sound effects. Of course you'll lose some money (that's a risk), but you may lose far more by sticking with a bad model. You may be surprised if the high quality demos sell better. ;)

[simonbowerbank]

Alright, ive implimented a mini media player to the site for the previews and replaced the low quality samples wth higher quality samples layered under speech.

I think this is how i will leave the site, and get back to adding sound effects. If any of you have any requests im more than happy to put them up.