soundHoundMore

-----muteAnt----------

-----easyFoley--soundHound--editMate--fontFinder

soundHound 1.5.4
Manual

Introduction
soundHound has been developed with audio engineers in mind, to help manage and access the vast array of sound effects and other audio media that is needed in todays audio visual industry.
With soundHound you can find, audition, copy, move and launch all your sound effects and other prerecorded media.
soundHound works in two ways. You can search mounted drives or across
networks for a file by name or partial name. You can choose what type of file you want to search for, and on what drives or combination of drives to search on. And these settings can be saved to make searches on future occasions easier to set up.
Search results appear in the soundHound window, and with a single key press you can audition your finds. Search results can be saved, sorted, launched and copied all from within soundHound. So you could keep combinations of your favourite sounds for instant use anytime.
In combination with the supplied databases soundHound can find any sound Effect on any of the commercially available sound libraries. For example you want to find ‘Thunder’ effects. Tell soundHound to hunt for Thunder it will come back with a description of the sound Effect, what library its from and what CD its on. Go one stage further. If you digitise all your CD effects onto a spare drive, soundHound wont only tell you where the effect is it will play it for you as well. Instantly. soundHound comes with all the major sound effect libraries databases, so even if you don't have the digitised media on-line you can still search for an effect and find
out what CD its on. Then at least you know which one to buy in the future. With libraryMaker you can create a library of your own. Create a folder of your favourite sound media and let libraryMaker create a database for use within soundHound.
Just take soundHound out for a quick walk and you'll wonder how you ever did without the little fella

Live Drives or Libraries
soundHound can search in two ways. By selecting "search Drives" from the lef hand pop-up menu you can search for any file type on any connected drive by name. Select "Search Libraries" from the pop-up and you can search through the commercially available libraries of sound effects. Although you can't search drives and libraries together in the same window you can switch between the two states and store results from either to build up a collection. Alternatively you could open two soundHound search windows, set one to search drives and the other to search libraries.

Searching a Live Drive
Select a file type to search for via the right hand pop-up menu, type in the name or partial name and press "Fetch". soundHound defaults to looking for sound Designer II files, AIFF, and TEXT files. You can save your own combinations of files types to search by selecting "Edit Bone Types" from the right hand pop-up. You can save combinations of drives to search as well. In this way if you knew that certain drives do not contain material you are looking for, you can eliminate them from your search thereby speeding up the process.

Searching a Library
Select "Search Libraries" from the pop-up menu, select a library or combination of libraries from the same pop-up, type a keyword in the editfield and hit "Fetch". The results appear in the listbox at the bottom. to audition one, select it and then hit the space bar. Hit the space bar to stop it playing, or select another effect to play and hit the space bar.

Tagging an Effect
To copy or move a file, it must be tagged in the search result listbox first. Do this simply click on the checkbox to the right of the file name or hit 'control - space' to tag the currently selected item. To untag do the same. From the edit menu you can tag items that come form the same drive or folder if they were found via a live drive search, or form the same CD or Library if they were found via a library search. You can also delete all untagged files from the edit menu, or tag all files and untagged all files. When you make a new search any untagged files are removed, so you should tag any files you are interested in as you find them. You can always untagged them later.

Copying/Moving Files
Only effects that have been tagged will be moved or copied. If an effect has been tagged in the results listbox the "Copy Files" button changes to "Set Path". Click this to bring up a dialog box to enable you to select the folder of your choice. If you are using ProTools you will probably want to select your current project folder, if not then you should choose some easily identifiable folder. Perhaps a specially created one on your desktop called "FX Bin Transfer" or some such. For Avid users you will probably want to copy effects into this bin, and then switch into your avid application and import the files from there. Unfortunatley avid does not support the
use of Apple Events to import files, although later software versions support Drag and Drop.

Playing Out Serach Results
You can set up soundHound to play out all the tagged sounds in one go one after the other. Tag some sounds to play out and then select "Play All Tagged Files" from the edit menu. The playout window appears which allows you to play, pause, and stop the playout of you search results. At the moment files are played out as is, soundHound will not play out files stored as mono left and right pairs in stereo.

Setting Media Paths
You can set the media path for a whole lot of cds at once, soundHound expects to be told where the folder that contains the cd folders are. It does not expect to be told where individual cd folders are. So it makes sense where ever possible to store cds from the same library in the same parent folder. Then you can set the media path for all the cds with one click. Open the Media Paths window from the "Media" menu, or press !-1. The listbox displays all the libraries you have currently in your "soundHound Libraries" folder. Flipping the disclosure triangle will reveal all the CD's in that library and all the paths to their media, if set. To set the media path for a CD or group of CD's tag the box to the right of the CD number and then press the "select Media" button.
Navigate your way in the resulting dialog box to the folder that contains the folders of media. You don't have to select individual media folders, only their parent folders. In this way you can select all CDs from one library in one go, without having to select each path for each CD.
To select a whole CD without having to click on each individual CD entry, click the disclosure triangle open and then option-click the library name. Closing the disclosure triangle deselects everything again.
Clicking the "Remove Media" button will remove any media paths for all tagged entries.

Notes on Digitising Media
You can use your software of choice to strip the effects from you purchased CDs but individual tracks must be named in the format "track 01". Thats one space between the word track and the number. Numbers less than 10 must have a prevailing zero. For split stereo files you append this format with your mono extension. So the above CD track 1 would be stored as two mono files named "track 01.L" and "track 02.R". You can store any number of mono extension pairs in soundHound but its probably wise to stick to the same ones, and the universally accepted norm is ".L" and ".R"
Individual tracks from the same CD must be stored in a single folder. Consider the folder as a virtual CD, and therefore you cannot split a CD's contents across two drives. The folder should be called Lib 01. That is the abbreviated library name as it appears in soundHound followed by a space, followed by the CD number with a prevailing zero for numbers less than 10. So a folder that contains the media for the sixth BBC CD should be named "BBC 06" and the fifth Hanna Barbara CD would be "HB 05"
Folders of sounds for individual CDs should, but not necessarily, be stored in a folder that bears the library name. It is not important what you call this only that you know what it is. You are able within soundHound to set the file path for individual CDs with a library. So the media for a library can be split across drives. Until soundHound does some intelligent searching it is up to you the user to keep a track of where you put the media.
Library databases within the the 'soundHound Libraries' folder must have the same name as the abbreviated library as it appears in the database. Which is of course the same name as you've used to label the virtual CD folders.

-----