Description:
Spanning eight CD-ROMs, Data Becker's Sound Clips 10,000 is a wonderful collection of clear, high fidelity music and effects clips. These are not complete soundtracks or songs, but something much more: sound bytes and music loops that are designed to be laid down in tracks and looped. This allows users to build a virtually endless combination of soundtracks. The majority of clips are 44 kHz/16 bit (in .WAV format), making them good enough not just for CD-ROM or Web presentations but video work as well. Six of the CD-ROMs are of a certain category of music: techno, house, hip-hop, dance, rock/pop, and classical/New Age, each with a varying collection of tempos. The other two discs are vocals and various sound effects, including choir chords, vocal effects, machine sounds, and radio voice effects. Also included is an application designed to browse the discs and preview the sounds. It allows for testing mixed tracks, up to four at a time, and will copy the selected tracks to a destination folder on a hard drive. It's not an editing application, though, and does not mix down tracks or adjust levels. There are some drawbacks to the collection, one minor and one substantive. First, the CD-ROMs come in paper sleeves, not jewel cases or a bound book. This makes it all too easy to lose or damage a disc. Worse, though, is that there is no way to perform a keyword search when compiling tracks. This is a vast collection of sounds, and much of the time you'd like to spend building a specific soundtrack is spent searching through the categories and listening to individual bytes, one clip at a time. Diverse, high-quality sound libraries are both invaluable and hard to find. Sound Clips 10,000 is a large collection of CD-quality music and effects, and (pardon the pun) a sound way to build an audio library. --Mike Caputo
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