“BOOM sound designer David Osternacher talks about “AudioFinder”, a great software tool to find and organize your plethora of sound effects. Enjoy reading:
SOFTWARE TIP: ICED AUDIO – AudioFinder
(dos) When I first got started in sound design, and was setting up my, well, setup, I was shocked by the price of common audio asset management software. As a novice sound designer, you probably won’t have an extra 900 bucks or so to spend, in addition to the speakers, microphones, recorders, computers, acoustic treatments and 200 other things you have to buy if you want to get serious in this business.
When I started at BOOM, Axel Rohrbach suggested Iced Audio’s Mac OS Software AudioFinder to me. At a stunning $ 69.95 (at the time of writing), AudioFinder does pretty much everything a good audio asset manager does.
Finding and organizing
You can either browse your drives manually, or have AudioFinder crawl your system (or specific folders), creating a database with all your audio files, including metadata. The search results can be sorted by time, size, samplerate, and many more categories, which can be a huge timesaver when dealing with large amounts of files. Another way to go is tag based browsing, also supported by AudioFinder.
Editing and processing
Once you have found your desired file, there’s a lot you can do to tweak it, before ever starting up your sequencer. Not only can you edit your files, there are a number of basic processing options available, such as the ever-useful pitch shift, normalize, or change gain. Additionally, you can load up any of your AudioUnit plugins for processing or playback, unfortunately only one at a time.
Features like split to dual mono, join split stereo to interleaved, the very special micro harmonic comparison as well as the option to play back finder selections make it even more handy.
All of those measures are non-destructive, AudioFinder creates new files when processing audio.
Metadata
With AudioFinder you cannot only read and search metadata, you can also write it. What you can’t (yet?) do is batch-import metadata, for example from an Excel file. This is my only real complaint with the software, because as a library producer, you simply need that functionality, and I would really enjoy being able to do that within my primary asset manager.
Conclusion
At a fraction of the competition’s price, AudioFinder delivers in almost every respect. It’s a definite recommendation to beginners as well as experienced professionals, though only available for Mac OS.
For all the features that I didn’t mention, but are nonetheless awesome, please refer to icedaudio.com
