For many of us working in audio post, Soundly is a great resource for sound effects. With a searchable database of sounds which can be searched, auditioned and then easily downloaded from the Soundly app and imported in a DAW, it’s a continually evolved and growing resource. In fact, Soundly recently announced the addition of their 100,000th sound effect!

With so many sounds available, it can usually provide the majority of sound effects you’re likely to need. Even so, most of us have our own libraries of sounds we’ve either recorded ourselves or accumulated over time. Fortunately, Soundly provides features to allow the integration of our personal sound libraries into our Soundly cloud. By simply dragging and dropping files or folders into the interface, users can upload files to the Soundly cloud to be able to access them from anywhere.

As well as being hugely convenient since we no longer need to carry drives of sound effects around with us, there’s also the option to share your cloud library with other registered Soundly users. Depending on the permissions you set, users can add files to the library themselves or just have view and download access. This is a nice feature for teams of people who work collaboratively offering shared access to a repository of sound effects (more on this below).

Soundly comes with 10GB of storage in its subscription but Multi User Licences are also available, which provide great flexibility in how the Soundly Cloud storage is distributed among various team members that are part of that organisation. For example, you might designate 1GB for one user, 19GB for another, or even 0GB for a temporary user who might be working just for a short period of time. This also makes the whole cloud collaboration super easy for teams and organisations.

At times, you may wish to only share a select number of sound effects with some users. This can be the case when working on a project where you only want to give people access to the files applicable to a particular project. In those cases, rather than sharing your whole library, you have the option to create collections of select sound effects, which can then be shared. There are several use cases for sharing collections in this way. These include:

• Having collections for soundboarding / moodboarding where a team is trying to come up with the texture of soundscapes they are aiming for. The new sound someone creates would then be easy to design with references from the same genre.

• Game Jams where multiple people are working on audio. Since these events have a time limit, the search and plan of sound can be divided among members contributing to the same Collection. Working in this way could also speed up the search for required sounds.

• A field recorder who is out recording sounds for a film / game can upload them directly to Soundly's Cloud storage and share with other users giving instant access to everyone else working on the project.

• A team of sound designers working on a game can have all assets made for the game available in the same library whichever part of the world they are working from.

As an alternative to storing files in the Soundly cloud, integration with Google Drive, Dropbox and Amazon S3 is also provided. Users can link them to Soundly which gives them even more freedom and that way if they already have an existing folder in any of these services, they don’t have to download the whole thing and re-upload. With the integration, the files show up within Soundly and can be searched and used like every other file. To use this feature, users can go to the Database menu on the top, select "Add Cloud Storage Provider", choose their preferred storage and follow the next steps.

Check out the video below, where I demonstrate the process of creating your own Soundly Cloud Library.