Sounds.com is a subscription-based loop and sample site – but it’s also a glimpse into Native Instruments’ future strategy for digital services for musicians.
Today, NI are revealing Sounds.com – a product in 2018 that sounds like someone registered a domain in 1996. That domain name pretty much covers it: it’s a place to go get sounds, in the form of loops and samples. It’s only available as a beta in the United States now, but will roll out to the rest of the world over the course of this year.
And we’re talking just straight, high-quality WAV files here – audio, for use anywhere. (No, not STEMS, since someone asked.)
You can check out the beta now. I’ve had the chance to talk to Matthew Adell (NI’s new digital services chief) and Sunny Lee (Product Owner) about the product, and poked around the beta and sounds a bit in advance. Here’s a sense of what this might mean as a product itself, but also some of the potential to sound designers and future NI products – if the service and its underlying infrastructure are fully exploited.
What’s the pitch for Sounds.com?
There are, of course, a lot of purveyors of loops and sound content. But what NI’s tool here promises is a deeper, broader catalog of sounds from multiple sources, combined with better tools for searching them.
You won’t see much of Native Instruments’ name on the site, and even their own products are in the background. So Maschine Expansions are there, if that’s your thing – but NI is just one of 200 providers. The Loop Loft, MVP, and Symphonic Distribution sit alongside lots of smaller shops. NI also says they’ve got a lot of exclusive content, and are launching with half a million sounds.
You can navigate by genre, covering not just dance genres, but things like “cinematic,” too. You’ll see bundled releases, but also individual sounds.
That could broaden the appeal here. Maybe you don’t want some massive set of Deep House or EDM loops. Fine – search for a single perfect clap one-shot. Maybe you want to explore some weird Reaktor-produced noises made by Applewhite on left-field label Detroit Underground. Or you’re on a tight TV or film scoring deadline and want to grab some unique sounding percussion. Or you just want some sounds to mangle quickly.
Because it’s easy to find one-shots, and because there’s tons of sound material that isn’t genre specific, it seems likely that Sounds.com will appeal to some people who haven’t bothered with loop or sample content before.
Native Instruments have talked a lot lately about reaching more customers. Here, they offer a fair amount of tools in a completely free, unpaid tier. You don’t even need an account to start poking around and previewing. But a free account nets you some selected free downloads.
US$9.99 a month gets you an all-you-can-eat diet of unlimited downloads of whatever you want. (This is the US-specific one for now; the free tier already works worldwide.) Even if you cancel and re-up, those downloads reappear… just in case you have a habit of not backing up and dropping beers on your hard drives.
There’s an underlying technical competency story here, though. In addition to investing over the past year in the cloud and products team, NI has been quietly over time developing in-house expertise in what’s called Music Information Retrieval. Basically, that’s the somewhat arcane research field of developing algorithms that identify sounds and metadata more clearly. This stuff has been bouncing around Europe for years, but it tends to involve stuffy academic contexts and music industry.
The twist here is, some of that “MIR” business can turn out to be, well, fun and useful to you and me. NI tells CDM these algorithms are sharp enough to analyze the difference between a closed and an open high hat. With a bunch of other built-in intelligence about metadata and tagging and the like, this could mean you actually find the sounds you want. We’ll need some time to test that, and because an online service like this both develop over time and can learn from additional data, it’s something that may well evolve.
But yeah, instead of training Facebook how to serve you ads, you might soon instead be training Native Instruments how to identify and find sounds. (It’s fitting we’re exploring machine learning as a topic this year with our hacklab for CTM Festival Berlin.)
And honing in on individual sounds is part of the mission. Thanks to better search tools, you’ll quickly find you can even ignore genre classification and search however you want – including key, BPM, and other sonic characteristics. There are also tools for grouping by artist/producer and label. (Some of those appear to be set to develop over time.)
With its direct access to one-shots and more left-field options, plus a visual waveform preview and lots of metadata, Sounds.com resembles nothing if not long-running platform https://freesound.org/ – more than something like the Beatport Sounds section. (As far as content, I can’t imagine freesound stacking up to this any more than I can imagine Sounds.com replacing freesound. Case in point: as I write this, freesound has as its sound of the day “procesión de la borriquita” –the procession of the donkey – from the first week of Easter in Tarifa, Spain. Still, the interface and some of the appeal do overlap.)
Lots of familiar sound design houses and artists are there – here’s the legendary Hank Shocklee, who’s been a continuous inspiration in technology for us.
Sounds.com is quick and easy enough that I imagine this could be a huge amount of fun. I’m not a huge fan of soundware, and even I started thinking of how to use this. Hello, Maschine Audio device.
What does this mean for sound creators?
Native Instruments, particularly through their flagship sampler KONTAKT and more recently their NKS format, have always been a platform and reseller for independent sound designers. Now, they actually have a working online platform to do that. NI are promising creators a fluid means to upload and manage their content, as well as a potential commercial opportunity.
The subscription model I imagine could also be disruptive if your business model was based on the à la carte release approach, but we’ll also have to see if these two models reach different customers (and accordingly supply different kinds of content). Consuming sound content for production also isn’t quite the same as consuming albums for listening, even if the buy/subscribe model here is a parallel.
Also, NI say their longer range plan is to provide an open API, also suggesting new developer integrations in music products not made by NI – first to select partners later this year, and then more broadly as they collect user and developer feedback.
What’s the bigger picture at Native Instruments?
Sounds.com has developed over the past year under the leadership of NI’s new “Chief Digital Officer,” Matthew Adell. Adell has experience at Napster and Amazon – and at Beatport. During his tenure, Beatport launched their Sounds section, which then saw explosive growth.
Now, the important thing here is, yes, there’s the specific product Sounds.com – but there’s also the team that built it and the plumbing they created to make it work. Adell confirmed to CDM that this is just a beginning.
More left-field and independent creations show up here, too. Here’s Detroit Underground with Marshall Applewhite. That’s an important story, as well, as it means this service is about NI’s ecosystem of sound creators, not just the sounds from NI themselves (though those are there, of course).
In addition to releases, you can find sounds individually, by collection, or here – again with label Detroit Underground – by provider. There’s no navigation to find them directly apart from search yet.
It’s a no-brainer that we’ll see Sounds.com integration in NI products in some form. But NI says their new, integrated digital services team can make these kinds of tools available across the whole NI product range – and even possibly on future hardware. Sounds.com represents the first product built atop a new cloud platform. (They’re using React JavaScript library on the front end, among other things, in case you’re interested.)
I hope that’s the case, because it could make the experience of using NI software significantly better.
Let’s back up and consider the user. We’re already essentially using NI as an online service provider, it’s just that they don’t behave much like one.
You’re a producer, and you’re using Maschine and Komplete. Right now, not even all upgrades and sound content are available in Native Update. Buying and upgrading is … well, complicated. And then storing and accessing your own sounds is often a chore.
Could this MIR stuff help you find and tag your own sounds and snapshots? Well, heck yes – especially because my guess is you’re even less likely to be organized about tagging and organizing your own files. (I’ve seen musicians’ hard drives. A lot of you are … let’s say right brain dominant. “Messy as #$*&” also fits.)
Cue points in Traktor that show up everywhere? Well, now there’s plumbing to make that happen (this appeared briefly in an iPad app, then disappeared right as we said we liked it).
Synchronized Reaktor Blocks ensembles and snapshots? Why not? (The free VCV Rack is already working on that.)
I’d love to use sophisticated sync and MIR technologies to locate and share my sounds and parameters. But it remains to be seen whether this modern approach from the online team in Los Angeles will be able to wrangle the complex web of different products and code that a lot of us use in Komplete and the like.
Sounds.com is recipient of some of the recent funding NI acquired, but its gestation started before that funding, NI say – so we’ll see how this unfolds later this year. Pro software and especially hardware products have much longer development cycles, so expect some of these fruits to appear later.
In the meanwhile, this is an encouraging step – and you’ve got some sounds to play with.
http://sounds.com [public beta; login available only from the USA but preview features available to all]
Addendum: The competition
Readers point to some of the services they’re using now.
Splice Sounds is a leader in the subscription area – and they’ve got a head start, with some of the bigger loop/content providers missing here, and some two million sounds to NI’s half a million (at launch). They also integrated third-party presets independent of vendor, which NI aren’t doing, and while they may lack some of the sophisticated retrieval research NI has, Splice does have easy drag-and-drop tools versus NI’s basic download function.
Noiiz also do unlimited samples and loops for a monthly fee, and like Splice they also add presets for synths. A plug-in is available as interface, so you’re also more integrated with your DAW. And they’re promising a sampler and “Instrument Suite” (though not saying what the latter is), though time will tell whether users are willing to migrate from their existing tools of choice just for more integration.
Loopmasters have offered their own cloud service, Loopcloud.
Noiize and Splice look really powerful. Basically, it seems NI excels at search, whereas Noiize and Splice offer more paths to browsing. And NI has some catching up to do on sound – and we don’t know what their integration story will be.
But I’ll say this for NI: I have to wonder if the simplicity of focusing on sounds is actually an advantage and not a liability. Integrating effects and presets may seem appealing on the surface of it, but most instruments and effects have good tools for managing presets. It’s usually a matter of going out and finding additional samples (loops or one-shots or whatever) that they’re lacking.
This space is evolving fast. I hope to talk more to Matthew – partly because I’m interested in the larger digital picture at NI, not just this particular product – and I’m very interested to hear how you use these competitors.
Uh-oh! Just registered for Splice, Loopcloud, and Noiiz.
+1 for Splice, I doubt sounds.com will get the continued focused attention a site like Splice does.
Was wondering about the US-only part.
Tried registering with a Canadian credit card and though it properly formats the Postal Code (not Zip Code), it didn’t work.
Does it support their Stems format? If not, what does it say about Stems in general?
$10 a month here, $10 a month there pretty soon you’ve subscribe yourself into the poorhouse!
Sure, but you can switch this on and off …
OK Sure but … it’s a business model but I don’t have to like it. While it may be use to some people: people doing soundtrack & commercial work who want to gank a sound to get a cue done and send their invoice.
But it’s a revenue stream that depends too much on people forgetting to cancel. It’s the idea that you can get money from people who don’t actually use your product.
By the way, just remembered I need to cancel Hulu…
So… Exploring Sounds.com a bit.
Feels like it’s closer to Noiiz than anything else (especially since the Samplephonics service just launched a monthly plan): pay a set fee, get unlimited downloads now. Some magic sauce technologies of the futurez allow you to find some other closed hi-hat sample which sounds slightly different from the one you were already using. At some point, eventually, possibly, one day, maybe, you might get added features. If they feel the pressure before a big event like NAMM.
Not saying that Noiiz is great, but this is probably where the comparison is the aptest, at this point.
What Noiiz already has which NI’s inaugural service doesn’t have:
* Upload your own sounds (Loopcloud promises this will come, Noiiz has it now: 5MB per upload, max 5GB)
* Plugin version to drag sounds into a DAW (Splice and Loopcloud also integrate with DAWs; Splice even has a minimal app on iOS, the dream would be an AUv3 plugin for use in Audiobus, BeatMaker 3, Cubasis…)
* Find related sounds (NI promises this will come, but Noiiz has it now; certainly, distinguishing between closed and open hi-hats shouldn’t be too hard, so it’s really reassuring that Adell mentioned that)
* Download plugin patches (could make a lot of sense for NI, especially with Kontakt instruments and the world-famous Reaktor User Library)
* Extended filter/tag (pack or creator, basically; Splice has labels and a category for “Cinematic FX”; Loopcloud has formats and content types, as well as multiple tags per filter; one of those may distinguish between dry and processed, which is incredibly useful)
There’s a lot that none of these services have. Including a thriving community of people who work together with some of the same sounds, providing examples of final results. (Though these services do promise features to support something like this, developing an actual community isn’t just an engineering challenge.)
These services provide very little details about the recordings themselves. Or help us in crediting performers. Or bring extra features like alternative formats, splice/loop/warp points, embedded wavetables, MIDI versions of melodic or rhythmic lines, etc.
Also, all these services focus on a very narrow range of genres which make heavy use of very similar sounds. So you get an overwhelming haystack filled with 808-like one-shots and step-sequenced loops. Still, you may find a few hidden gems (needles in the analogy). If you’re lucky.
Nice breakdown. Yeah, it’s still really murky what’s going to happen with sound creators… that seems far off.
Splice also has four times as many sounds as NI does at launch.
Mind if I paste an excerpt of your comment in the article?
Would be an honour!
(Sorry for the delay.)
As a consumer, I’m excited by this (especially the machine learning), but as someone who makes a significant chunk of income from sound design and sample sets, it’s a little bittersweet to see the full on ‘all you can eat’ model make it’s way to this little corner of the music industry.
Who knows – maybe it’ll open up the market to people who felt priced out of full releases in the past, but this kind of thing hasn’t traditionally been a boon for creators, and as much as I love Splice, it isn’t doing my family any favors. 😉
Thing is though, the subscription model makes so much sense (for the end user) that I really can’t be mad at anyone for the disruption, to a degree. [shrug…]
The only thing that worries me a bit – and honestly, this goes for writing and releasing music too – is the way this changes the artist/audience relationship, and the motivations for both, when it comes to challenging work.
There already isn’t really any point to making whole albums anymore, beyond the artistic desire to do so, as most people are going to skip right past anything they’re not feeling right away, and I wonder how this business model might also change my motivation(s) as a sound designer, especially when it comes to complicated projects. Is there still a point to working on something until it feels complete, or to trimming the fat if it’s starting to feel bloated, or worrying about these things at all, if the whole mess is just going to be cherry picked to death?
Splice at least limits the number of downloads at each tier (granted – it’s a high number), which imbues each with an intrinsic value that isn’t really there when you can literally grab as much as you like, whenever you want. What is anyone’s motivation to stick with a challenging sound/loop/pad they’ve already grabbed, if it doesn’t click for them right away, and what then is a creator’s continued motivation to even produce challenging sounds (or sounds that are a challenge to make) if each individual piece is essentially worthless?
I’m over reacting, I know, and believe me – this isn’t keeping me up at night (yet), but I wonder about things like this when it snows 4″ in Nashville and I’m trapped in the house for days. 😉
+1 Insightful
Maybe part of the answer is that the relationship is indeed changing. Slowly. Audiences still exist and they may remain in the foreseeable future. But the whole “everyone is an artist” idea is partly a way to overcome the commodification of music as it happened in the second half of last century.
Haven’t read Jacques Attali’s very recent stuff but he had a keen understanding of the “political economy” of music, back in the late 1970s. He also had interesting points to make about music-related industries back when France tried implementing its Hadopi system, nine years ago.
I hear you, though — note that these are just audio loops and one-shots. Dedicated sampler sounds, etc., have already survived subscription-based services from sounds (as others mention here.)
Hm I need months to finish a patch bank until I feel this is right.
if I look at what other ppl do I can tell right away if it’s good quality and has a red line going through it or if it’s half finished ideas, random stuff put together and is unplayable crap.
No mention in your article of the existing services like Splice Sounds?
I love Splice Sounds and while I don’t get “unlimited” downloads for my $9 a month, I get more than I know what to do with. What makes sounds.com better, if anything?
I think in short — search. NI have some more tools for that than Splice appears to have at the moment. But with very little of that power surfaced in the actual product, right now… you’re right, I think there’s not *much* reason to use this instead of Splice, unless you found sound providers on Sounds.com that were missing on Splice and you liked them. 😉
Hm lots of dancy sounds and loops. What’s the point?
An 8 year old could come up with something listenable with that.
That’s no fun and not very creative.
Isn’t the whole fun about coming up with your own sounds?
Cloud backup for your own samples and ish? Meh I ve got enough usb sticks thx.
The machine learning part to find similar stuff is interesting, but not in the cloud and not on a subscription based service …
Im wondering if that’s a cool usecase to abuse the hot stuff in the new Apple a chips?!
With you on the dancy stuff. Sounds like all these services are about dance beats. In fact, much of the scene is about an imagined dancefloor. Of course, everyone in Europe keeps dancing to electronic music every night of the week but, on this side of the pond, clubs are a tiny part of where music is played and enjoyed.
As for the other parts of these services, the case is being made. May not be your cup of tea, of course. But there’s something to be said about managing your samples without having to take up too much space on your internal SSD. Surprisingly, these services don’t yet work on mobile devices, where storage is at a real premium.
I just looked at my own sample lib of collected and created stuff over the past 20 years, it’s only about 1 gb of audio …
Well of course it’s not multisampled Pianos and stuff, but this isn’t either …
If I need more than I just do it for that project and that’s it.
I never finish anything if I have to choose from 3 million snare sounds.
Sounds like you may have avoided the problem a lot of musickers have, possibly because you had more discipline than most.
Many people, myself included, have been hoarding samples because “they might come in handy, sometime”. And we end up with a big “needle in the haystack” problem. With these services, we can easily end up with just a bigger haystack. Problem exacerbated, not solved. But the promise of more easily finding the things we need is quite motivating. Especially if we can share them between devices and don’t have to worry about backups. You may say it’s a flawed motivation, but it makes a lot of sense in terms of consumer behaviour. When you think about democratization, it makes even more sense. Clearly, part of NI’s funding had to do with this kind of mainstreaming.
And while @peterkirn:disqus distinguishes NI’s offering in terms of one-shots instead of loops, it does offer both.
Playing with recorded loops may sound silly to many musicians. Some of us even blame this trend for what we perceive as a lack of diversity in current musical styles.
But, you know what, it’s actually fun to do as a musicking activity which can lead to something creative. It’s a form of participation in music which goes in line with all sorts of explorations happening throughout the years, like cratedigging before Hip Hop or even player pianos in parallel with audio recordings.
Would people pay 10$ a month to have a constant feed of Apple Loops for use in GarageBand? Quite likely. Many hobby photographers already pay for a service to host their own pictures. In this case, it’s about getting access to other people’s work and do anything they want with it. Pretty compelling for musicking as a hobby, especially when it becomes a serious one.
Maybe it’s Loopmasters feeling the pressure and pre-announcing Loopcloud 2.0 features that they’ll announce during NAMM. Maybe it’s Noiiz doing a user survey to check on which of their pre-hyped features their current users want the most. Maybe it’s longterm fatigue from all the soundpack sales and bundles. But there’s a point at which this becomes a pitching match between remarkably similar soundware vendors.
Became increasingly snarky about the whole thing. Especially about this promise that “search” will solve everything. While NI turns up the heat on its search feature… trying it gives me irrelevant results. Maybe it’s meant to be for those people whose musicking needs fit neatly in this one little box. But it’s very difficult to perceive what makes Sounds.com distinctive when search results only appear to catch keywords.
Maybe we’re in the Excite/Altavista/Lycos/Yahoo moment before Google search came to the scene. But it really doesn’t sound like NI has the key insight which made PageRank a gamechanger, 20 years ago (hint: it was Citation Impact that Larry Page appropriated to Web searches; maybe there’s a lesson there).
Here’s a very simple situation. Let’s say you want more sounds like “180 Gmin Magicmouth” part of Loop Loft’s “Flutes of Fire” from a month ago.
https://sounds.com/release/3441
How do you find that? Which keywords should you use? Let’s say you want it dry, so you can add your own effects. Say you want sounds which are harmonically compatible but not necessarily played on a flute. Or you want to extract something from that overall melody, using other sounds. How should you proceed?
Even simpler, say you want more of Machatchka’s work. How do you get any of this through Sounds.com itself?
(Kind of funny that, in my case, the first DuckDuckGo result for “Machatchka” is a video called “The Most Expensive Loops Ever” about the very sample pack Sounds.com has but doesn’t find through search.)
Such initial searches are only a very small step in the whole process. How do you organize those sounds in your own collection once you found them? Say you absolutely want to credit every human beings whose sounds you’re appropriating and you did extensive work with that “Magicmouth” sample, along with related samples. How do you find adequate information for full attribution?
Another take. Let’s imagine that you heard a sound that find particularly compelling and you weren’t able to record it. A fun example for me is the troll-like sound at 0:47 in Lillebroer Og Storebroer from the Rosensfole album by Agnes Buen Garnås and Jan Garbarek. Probably not to hard to reproduce, but kind of hard to find “in nature”.
https://open.spotify.com/track/5nwnaLrUZos4xm2qIkFAb5
What’s the best way to find something like this?
Sorry if this was mentioned in the article, I’m at work and skimming – can anyone verify if the downloaded sounds are pre-tagged for the Maschine/Komplete library? That would be the deciding factor for me between all the different services.
You can see New Loops packs in most pictures, pretty cool! . 🙂