Sound Clips 10,000

by Data Becker

Product Details

• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B00001QEA5
• Date first available at Amazon.com: October 24, 1999
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #21,336 in Software (See Top 100 in Software)
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

Amazon.com Review

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

Product Description

CD WIN 95/98

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent, if poorly indexed, start to a sound library, March 5, 2000

By 

tropic_of_criticism - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sound Clips 10,000 (CD-ROM)

Unlike the claims of some clip art/sound collections, Sound Clips 10,000 really does deliver what it promises. The sound quality is truly excellent on each clip, and the variety of sound effects and musical tracks is impressive. Given that most sound clip libraries start out at over $100 for substantially fewer sounds, this package is a genuine value for money.

Where some might quibble with its overall utility, however, is the fact that the 10,000 sounds does not mean 10,000 unique sounds. Indeed, there are hundreds of sounds that are more or less duplicated, except for pitch and tone. Personally, I think this range of similar sounds makes sense and will ultimately enhance my use of this product, but I can see that some may feel the claim of 10,000 sounds has been exaggerated.

Still, it's fair to say there are at least seven or eight thousand entirely unique sounds across several different genres. There's everything from rap to UFO samples here. It's likely that you'll be able to find at least one sound to use in any multimedia project you might design.

Sadly, though, the product is made hard to use by the lack of a comprehensive index. In my view, there should have been a complete written record of every single sound, arranged alphabetically and by category. This is especially true of the myriad single note sounds, each done in a sightly different pitch and tone. An index here would be especially valuable because sometimes you want to easily find, say, a C-flat clarinet held for a whole note. Unfortunately, you have no way of doing that with this product as is. If this whole package had been placed on a single DVD, a searchable index would've been easy to include to complement the missing written index.

Despite all this, though, the product remains imminently recommendable. If you're just starting out with multimedia design, you'll instantly get a wealth of sounds that will save you a lot of time and expense.

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Great to make techno mixes, but poor in other areas, October 13, 2000

By 

Daniel Nelson (Nashville, TN United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sound Clips 10,000 (CD-ROM)

I'm a web designer and I work with Flash, and I was looking for sounds I could use for sites. It claims to have lots of button sounds but I'm yet to find some. The .wav files are named with numbers, so there no way to search with keywords. You have to explore the CD and listen to each .wav file not knowing what you will get.

But, it is great for making your own techno mixes. You can take bass loops, drum loops ect and mix them together and ajust the levels etc.

I guess the search is still on for sofware or a site to provide me with lots of cool sounds for buttons, mouseovers, etc.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars By far the best "sample" purchase I have made!, May 23, 2002

By 

"pets_playground" (petserrano.com) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sound Clips 10,000 (CD-ROM)

8 cd's of sounds! Techno-musician's dream! Whoo-Hoo!

Voices in classical and House styles, instruments labeled by key, symphonic, percussion and rock bangs, and ambient sounds for backgrounds or New Age, all in an intuitive package that works much like a file explorer.

Includes a 4 track mixer for loops, and search functions for types of files by instrument, category or Beats Per Minute. Best of all-- no hissing background noise! I really needed some loud guitar for one of my songs, and it turned out so well, you would think I actually recorded one into the song. Nope! Just cut and paste!

Also, unlike other sound collections I've gotten, these are in WAV format, and the interface allows you to copy the sounds you want into folders on your computer with no argument or hassle. Just select the file name and copy to your destination folder, just like any other file. No converting, no opening and saving as a wav, no recording with a wav editor. You don't even have to open the program to do it if you know what files you want.

I usually use this with Voyetra's "Techno EJay". The music sounds 10x as professional, with a tenth of the effort I used to put in when I wrote from scratch.