How big is your SFX library!?!

[aleatoric]

I thought this would be a fun post......how many GB's is your SFX library?

[TheWorkRoom]

Roughly 100GB... BWAV's & 320 MP3's

[mm-pro]

450 Gigs of wave files and counting.

Regards,

MM

[mahasandi]

At least a 100gb but that's longer files that I get myself
so in the end much less used.(if you want it done right)
In fact I never have time but going thru
and cutting up and naming sections is great
for later accesss

[meathman]

2.3 TB , but I can probably subtract about 250 GB for duplicate files

[Mydog_Nixon]

84,951 sfx's which amounts to 381 gigs of space.

[GYMusic]

40 years worth. I think "how organized is your SFX library" is more important.

[Mydog_Nixon]

I love the new sound miner. It is very easy to organize and find SFX's quickly and with out headaches. What are you guys using to organize your SFX's?

[danijel]

Originally Posted by Mydog_Nixon

I love the new sound miner. It is very easy to organize and find SFX's quickly and with out headaches. What are you guys using to organize your SFX's?

being on a PC, no soundminer for me. i convert everything to pdf (lots of libraries already provide pdfs), then (once in a while) i make a new acrobat index file (pdx) at a friend's adobe acrobat professional. that makes searching through all the pdfs at once really fast, and also provides boolean operators, and a 'proximity' operator (how close to each other the words you enter need to be).

[TVPostSound]

198,780 topping out at 2.1 terabytes.

Soundminer

[Sandersonic]

Well, pretty massive!



:-)

[seanmccoy]

About 250 Gb here.

Originally Posted by danijel

being on a PC, no soundminer for me. i convert everything to pdf (lots of libraries already provide pdfs), then (once in a while) i make a new acrobat index file (pdx) at a friend's adobe acrobat professional. that makes searching through all the pdfs at once really fast, and also provides boolean operators, and a 'proximity' operator (how close to each other the words you enter need to be).

Danijel, you should check out Basehead (if you haven't already). Very good PC SFX database program, and they have a good ripper as well. They're not quite up to SoundMiner efficiency level yet, but are making rapid improvements, it's inexpensive and the support is excellent.

BaseHead Inc.

[georgia]

About 2 terabytes with Soundminer as the interface.

cheers
geo

[charles maynes]

I have about 2tb with relatively few duplicates... Soundminer is my tool of choice=


A good added question is how much time do people spend maintaining their libraries?...

For me, I usually spend at least 4 hours a week.

[danijel]

Originally Posted by seanmccoy

Danijel, you should check out Basehead (if you haven't already). Very good PC SFX database program, and they have a good ripper as well. They're not quite up to SoundMiner efficiency level yet, but are making rapid improvements, it's inexpensive and the support is excellent.

BaseHead Inc.

thanks for the tip! i installed it, but i couldn't do nothing in 15 minutes, so i'll try it again in a couple of days, when i find time.
also, i just realised there IS a windows version of soundminer. looking at it's video tour, i realize i'm in the stone age.....

[toolskid]

does anyone still use sonomix?

I had a couple of freelance gigs where they used it as their SFX management system.

A nice idea but unbelievably slow and the search function seemed really crippled...

[brucie]

Not is not about quantity but quality!!

[davenutz]

About 1.5tb between two seperate drives: "A" and "B."
"A" is general stuff, and "B" is speciality collections...sports, hunting, etc..

[Frank S.]

It's not the size of your library, it's how you use it.

[seanmccoy]

Originally Posted by danijel

thanks for the tip! i installed it, but i couldn't do nothing in 15 minutes, so i'll try it again in a couple of days, when i find time.
also, i just realised there IS a windows version of soundminer. looking at it's video tour, i realize i'm in the stone age.....

Right, there was no SoundMiner for Windows when I needed to go to a database, but I did use the SoundMiner ripper for Mac to extract all my CD's, and Basehead is able to access all the SoundMiner-ripped metadata just fine. We do have options! Bottom line is that a large library without a searchable, playable database is a total nightmare. That is the stone age!

[seanmccoy]

Originally Posted by charles maynes

I have about 2tb with relatively few duplicates... Soundminer is my tool of choice=


A good added question is how much time do people spend maintaining their libraries?...

For me, I usually spend at least 4 hours a week.

Out of curiosity, can you define library maintenance? I understand trimming, normalizing, SRC, etc., but what functions require four of your hours every week?

[minister]

Originally Posted by seanmccoy

Out of curiosity, can you define library maintenance? I understand trimming, normalizing, SRC, etc., but what functions require four of your hours every week?

When you do as much recording as Charles does, the editing, naming, meta-data descriptions..... takes a lot of time. Plus. he, like many others, records things with mulitple mics and setups.

When we finish a project for which we do sound we catalogue all our recordings. The last Feature we did had 7.5 Gig of Foley alone (mono).......

For another feature we are working on, we just recorded 10 different doors. Of all the behaviors with doors, and 10 different setups, you can see how many hours it would take some one to cut out the talking, the false takes, create fades, etc.....

Charles chides me for being sensible, but we don't usually do it as we go, we usually do it when there is some down time....and it can take days sometimes...because there are 3 projects worth of stuff waiting for us.....this is good work for assistants and interns.

[starcrash13]

I wish someone would spend 4 hours/wk on my library. What a mess! I've been too lazy to get organized.

At least I have a good excuse in the form of a nine-month-old ball of energy that keeps me busy for the few hours that I'm not at work cutting sound.

[charles maynes]

Originally Posted by seanmccoy

Out of curiosity, can you define library maintenance? I understand trimming, normalizing, SRC, etc., but what functions require four of your hours every week?

Mastering your sounds will take a good bit of time- but doing things like going through foley as tom said takes a good bit of time as well-

Last week on stage with Marti and Chris- I felt like the Maytag repair man- so I spent about 40 hours doing ingests to soundminer from projects that were on my drives- I actually got 45gbs of new sounds into shape (interleaved wav files) for the library...

It is a perpetual battle- and on some of the shoots I have done I brought back upwards of 50gbs of material from the session, which then requires mastering...

[meathman]

On a similar subject, How do you guys deal with duplicate files, Is there a program that will locate the files by their wave forms or something, and weed them out. My problem is , I have many duplicate files, but most of them have different names (they were re-named by a different editor)

And way to batch manage or weed these out?
Thanks

[starcrash13]

I've had good results with Hyperbolic Software - Tidy Up!

Originally Posted by meathman

On a similar subject, How do you guys deal with duplicate files, Is there a program that will locate the files by their wave forms or something, and weed them out. My problem is , I have many duplicate files, but most of them have different names (they were re-named by a different editor)

And way to batch manage or weed these out?
Thanks

[AKA]

soundminer is able to remove duplicates.

we have about 2.5tb of sfx (about 300,000 files).
spending about 1-2 hours p/w maintaining those.

[introvert]

I'm at roughly 78,000 sounds, about 350GB. My maintenance comes and goes. The library is totally caught up and together right now. The next time I go out and record, that may all change...

[aleatoric]

wow! can't believe some of you are in the 2TB range, nuts. mine is a little over 300GB. i want to pick up a portable recorder and start recording more of my own stuff as currently most of my library is well from library's. thanks for all the responses thus far.

[dr.sound]

Originally Posted by charles maynes

Last week on stage with Marti and Chris- I felt like the Maytag repair man- so I spent about 40 hours doing ingests to soundminer from projects that were on my drives- I actually got 45gbs of new sounds into shape (interleaved wav files) for the library...
...

Marti replies:
Now Charles, tell them why you felt like the Maytag repair man.

On a side note, those of you who have a project that needs Sound Design look no further! We had a great time working with Charles on the Feature we just Print Mastered.