Issue Date: May 1, 2005
Boing! Crash! Bam!
Find cool sound effects galore.
Hear a good punch (or snore or gallop or dental drill) at Sounddogs.com.
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Discovering Sounddogs.com is like taking your ears to the playground. The sound-effects library stocks some 240,000 high-quality audio files, and it's easy to get sucked in (roll suction noise). You can listen to thuds, swishes, hums, clatters and reverberations. There are more than 100 sound categories and hundreds of subcategories that lead you to files as specific as "boxing, vocalizations" (think grunting) in sports and "galactic battle" in science fiction. I loved the amphibian section (couldn't get enough of the gecko) and was blown away by the abundance of listings in the human sounds department (use your imagination).
Sounddogs was started by Rob Nokes in 1996 and went online the next year. Nokes has recorded sounds for more than 60 movies, including "Million Dollar Baby" and "Seabiscuit." For the latter, he spent five weeks collecting breaths, gallops, snorts and trots at racetracks. Nokes says his customers include students, DJs, movie producers and Web designers.
Sounds cost $1 to $15 and are priced according to their length and the complexity of the recording. For instance, buying a hiccup is a bargain compared with, say, the ribbit of an exotic frog in South America. You can preview sounds using Windows Media or MP3. Once purchased, files can be downloaded easily and used for anything from computer games to e-cards to home movies.
The site has sounds of things I believed to be silent, like knitting, haircuts and turtles. But be warned: The body punches and flesh-ripping sounds are painfully realistic, and the 60-second dentist's drill is so excruciating I recovered only after a few audio doses of a tent flapping in the wind.
-- Melanie D.G. Kaplan
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