Sound Ideas Is Audio Excellence!
Brian Nimens, President and CEO of Sound Ideas, began the company as a recording studio in Toronto, Canada in 1978. Today, Sound Ideas is the world's leading publisher of professional sound effects, offering more than 240 distinct royalty free collections to broadcast, post-production and multimedia facilities around the globe.
Series 1000, the very first royalty free sound effects library produced by Sound Ideas, was released on reel to reel tape in 1979. In association with the Phillips Corporation in Eindhoven, Netherlands - the birthplace of the compact disc - Sound Ideas published Series 1000 as the world's first compact disc sound effect library in 1985. The following year, Sound Ideas released Series 2000 - a 22 CD set that was the world's first fully digital sound effect library.
A joint venture with Lucasfilm led to the 1990 release of the highly successful Lucasfilm Adventure Series Sound Effects Library. This marked the first time that well known sounds from a renowned motion picture studio were made available for commercial use.
The concept of releasing material from the world's most recognized film studios has since inspired the production of sound effect libraries from Hanna-Barbera, Turner Entertainment, Twentieth Century Fox, Warner Bros., Universal Studios, Jay Ward Productions and the Saul Zaentz Film Center.
The company's signature product, the award-winning Series 6000 "The General", was released in 1992 as a 40 CD collection - a stunning assortment of sound effects that covers all the bases - from ambiences to zebras, with 4 CDs of sound designed effects especially produced by some of the industry's most well known names. Many other specialty products, and a series of Series 6000 Extension libraries, have followed The General. In particular, the Series 6000 Extensions offer updated sets of general effects, including comprehensive selections of recent vehicles, new communications devices and weapons.
SuperSearch, the company's own search software, allows the user to locate sound effect or music clips, make notes in the software, and print selected tracks to create production records. In recent years, Sound Ideas has also produced multi-platform sound effects libraries - products that contain the standard red book CD audio format, plus mp3 and .wav files for easier use in the multimedia editing room.
The Mix Music Library, has helped cement the company's reputation as a producer of high quality professional royalty free broadcast music. Sound Ideas offers a regularly refreshed variety of buyout music, along with several broadcast production elements products, like the popular Elements Café series.
Sound Ideas' release of the Immersion 5.1 Surround Sound Collection, produced by the respected feature film mixing team at Point One Studios, provides a collection of over 200 ambience effects and offers 6 channels of source material available in .wav file format, along with a red book stereo mix for convenient auditions.
The Sound Ideas sound effects and music collections are also available to custom license for cellular phone ring tones, mobile content and entertainment, and other specialty uses that require unsynchronized audio - like games, software, toys or promotional items.
The Ultimate SFX Collection on Hard Drive offers a complete sound effect and production element product line in a single package. The Ultimate provides the complete contents of more than 100 different collections - over 650 CDs of audio, fully digitized in broadcast wav file format, and embedded with all relevant metadata. It is available on either Mac or PC platforms in 3 different sample formats. With more than 128,000 sound effects and production elements, this astonishing "everything you need in 1 box" set is ready for easy drag and drop use. Fully customized hard drives are also available - customers get to choose exactly what sound products, sample rates and computer platforms they need.
Sound Ideas announced its acquisition of the Digiffects Sound Effects Library in early 2010. The addition of Digiffects to their product line means that Sound Ideas publishes more than 1,000 CDs of royalty free sound effects, production elements and royalty free music. The Digiffects Sound Effects Library is available in CD format as a 184 disc collection and on Hard Drive (in a variety of platform and file format choices).
And the latest buzz here is The General HD Sound Effects Library! Check out our YouTube promo video below for this 24 bit / 96 kHz high definition signature collection with over 26,000 premium sound effects on hard drive.
For more than 30 years, Sound Ideas has left its mark on the professional broadcast and film industry and it shows no sign of slowing down. A determination to continually improve industry standards for royalty free sound effects has kept the company at the forefront of audio excellence for a quarter of a century. They deliver the goods, offering an immense variety of contemporary and vintage sound FX. Dedicated to the world of professional audio, Sound Ideas also keeps its ears tuned to the future needs of sound designers and producers through the creation of new material and the adaptation of new technology.
