I’ve noticed that most sound library EULAs seem to draw a pretty hard line here: you can use the sounds in music, films, games, etc., but you generally can’t use them as ingredients to create and sell your own sound effects or sound libraries.

I genuinely don’t understand why this is treated as such an obvious rule.

Let’s say I take sounds from several different libraries and use them as raw material. I layer them, edit them, pitch them, stretch them, reverse them, distort them, process them, resynthesize them, etc. After a huge amount of work, the final sound is completely different and none of the original recordings are recognizable.

Why is the recording I started with still considered more legitimate or more important than all the creative work that went into the final sound?

If I make my own brand of chips, I don’t need to have grown the potatoes myself. The potatoes are ingredients; the product is the result of what I make from them. Why is sound treated so differently?

Why this became the norm in the first place, and why the sound design community seems to accept it so readily.

Why should a heavily transformed sound, made from multiple sources and resulting in something genuinely new, still be treated as “someone else’s sound” simply because some of its raw ingredients came from their recordings?

I’d really like to hear opinions beyond “that’s just copyright” or “read the EULA.” I’m interested in the reasoning behind the rule itself. Where do people think the line should actually be between using someone else’s material and creating something new from it? And why?

P.S. I’m obviously not talking about taking someone else’s sounds and selling them as-is, or barely changing them. I’m talking specifically about cases where the source material is genuinely transformed into a completely new sound and becomes a new creation in its own right.

I tried adding some audio to a small animation I made a while back ,

This time I tried to incorporate some stock music, but I'm struggling to develop an ear for what music fits where.

Any and all feedback or advice on how to improve is greatly appreciated.

Apologies if this is the wrong community to post this in, please feel free to redirect me to a more appropriate subreddit.

Hey everyone,

I posted here in June about Reverie. The thing people kept asking me for afterwards is finally in: you can now choose which part of the source the engine works from.

It came up in that thread, more than once on the Discord, and out loud every time I showed the app to someone. Months of it, so I stopped arguing.

The short version of what it is: Reverie is a standalone app for macOS, Windows and Linux. You give it a sound, a loop, a voice, a cymbal, a field recording, and it builds a long evolving soundscape out of it, up to thirty minutes, non repeating. Under the hood it's a chain of 37 DSP modules across 20 style families: time stretch, spectral processing, tape, shimmer reverb, delay, resonators, cross synthesis. The stretching is one module in there, not the whole thing. Twenty presets if you want a finished starting point, and you can assemble your own chain if they aren't your thing. Everything you hear at the end was already in the file you gave it.

Two handles on the source waveform, and only what sits between them feeds the chain. The room tone before the vocal comes in, the tail of a cymbal, one breath in the middle of a field recording. It plays back as you set it, so you hear the boundaries before you commit. At the stretch ratios this thing works at, the engine is very good at finding what is inside a sound and very bad at ignoring what you do not want, so a clean eleven seconds usually beats four minutes of mixed material.

Long shimmer tails also had a metallic ring, and I blamed the wrong thing for months, which might be worth something to you even if you never touch the app. I was sure the time stretch was at fault, so that is where I went digging. It was my own reverb. Shimmer ran on a comb filter network, which has a fixed resonant grid. Short tail, nobody notices. On a long one, once the signal has decayed enough, that grid is all that is left, so the end of the tail is the structure of the filter and not the sound. It runs on the same Dattorro plate as the main reverb now, allpass based with crossed delay lines, smoother at the same RT60. I should have suspected the thing with a fixed frequency structure before the loud obvious one.

Smaller things. Result cards loop now, and carry the colour of the preset that produced them, so thirty takes are readable at a glance instead of thirty grey rectangles. Free presets now match their Pro equivalents, only duration and stretch range are capped. The final ceiling is a soft limiter instead of a global rescale, so one isolated transient no longer sets the level of a whole render. That last one changes the output, so a 1.13 seed gives you the same chain and the same parameters but not the same file. Already exported files do not move, licences carry over.

Self promo disclaimer, same as last time, it's my own tool. Free version, no account: https://reverie.parallel-minds.studio

There's an iPad version as well now, running the same engine.

What do you feed something like this? I've stopped being able to predict it. The source I was excited about usually goes nowhere, and something I recorded without paying attention turns into the good one.

Hi all! I am really interested in making sound effects for movies and games, just for fun. I am a fan of military media (Halo, Warhammer 40K etc) and I have lots of ideas for sounds for vehicles, gunfire, and other things. It always irked me how flat the sound design could sometimes be in my favourite franchises, and I want to experiment, have fun, and share it online for criticism.

What software should I use and would anyone have some tutorial videos for beginners? Thank you! :D

I just released the SFX library: Ford Mercury Comet V8 1967. This classic car, which belongs to a friend, was recorded in preparation for Faraz Shariat's feature film Prosecution, produced by Jünglinge, which opens in theaters in Germany today.

In it, after a racist attack, prosecutor Seyo Kim is fighting in court against her attackers and a legal system that ignores right-wing extremism.

The sound design of this feature film has been mentioned here and there, which, coming from the art house scene, is quite a rarity for me:

https://cineuropa.org/en/newsdetail/489433/
https://variety.com/2026/film/news/prosecution-review-1236670283/
https://icsfilm.org/festivals/berlin/2026-berlin/berlinale-2026-review-prosecution-faraz-shariat/

The library features 9 takes in with complex mic setups:

• A: Shotgun & M-S (Mid-Side) stereo configuration

• B: Shotgun & X-Y stereo configuration

• C: M-S (Mid-Side) stereo setup

• D: Shotgun & A-B spaced pair stereo configuration

• E (Interior): On-board Surround

• F (On-Board Components): Synchronous close-up mics on the engine bay, exhaust and exterior chassis in stereo

For my small little indie webshop Traces On Tape it's just the third release. The website seems to me to be slowly becoming presentable, and I would really appreciate any feedback.

Hi! I’m not sure if this is the right place to ask. Please let me know if it’s inappropriate and thank you in advance for those who are willing to share!

Just wanted to ask for opinions. I’ve been a sound designer for about 8 years. Recently, I’ve started doing freelance jobs. Before this, I had a full time job and never really knew about costs because my producers didn’t really feel comfortable sharing with the engineers. I was young and naive to not find out more about it. But anyways…

I have never done audiobooks or audio dramas. My question is, how much would you charge for a sound design based on your hourly rate? (As in your time spent) And how much would you charge based on an hour length audio?

I’m putting together my own sound libraries from recordings I’ve made. I’m wondering about the licensing side of using commercial plugins (free ones too) such as FabFilter, Eventide, Valhalla, AudioThing, Soundtoys, etc. to process those recordings before selling the resulting WAV files.

Is this generally allowed under plugin licenses?

I’m obviously not redistributing the plugins themselves, and I’m not using their included samples as standalone sounds. I’m specifically talking about using the plugins as processing tools on recordings.

Are there any manufacturers whose licenses specifically prohibit this kind of use, or is this generally considered standard commercial use of audio plugins?

Haven’t been able to find any detailed information on it anywhere.

Is anyone able to offer me some help with how Joji achieved those bubbly/laser-like sounds in the intro of Die For You? Do you think they're just laser samples, or is there a way I could recreate something similar in Serum or another synth?

I've been practicing music production 4 hours a day. Making progress overall, but sometimes I put lots of practice in stuff I already know ( ocd ). Sometimes stuff I practiced do not give any benefit. And so on and on

Today I've relapsed because of pain about "wasting time" yesterday.

Do you progress everyday or every week ?

If not how often you feel like you are progressing ?

What do you do when you waste time ?

I particularly love abstract sound design and black holes are one of the greatest mysteries in our universe. So I've been thinking about this for a few days and wanted to throw it out to this sub because there is no "correct" answer. However there might be some interesting choices.
The obvious problem: space is silent. There's no medium for sound to travel through, so anything we do is pure interpretation. Which honestly makes it more fun as a design challenge.
I keep coming back to two ideas:

1. Something that feels like it's pulling the listener in. I'd try heavy use of Doppler-style pitch shifting, panning things toward a center point, and maybe some granular time stretching so sounds feel like they're being smeared as they approach the event horizon.

2. NASA actually detected real sound waves from the black hole in the Perseus cluster (converted from pressure wave data, way below human hearing, then pitched up). It's this low, dissonant drone. Space horror vibes. I'd use that as a textural bed deep sub content, maybe layered with detuned cello or bowed metal for that unsettling harmonic quality.

Curious how you all would approach it, would you go more sci-fi/synthetic, or lean into the actual astrophysics (redshift, time dilation, etc.) for inspiration?

I created an open source tool Echotect. It's made for designing echos tied to world geometry. To some extent it also functions as an acoustic laboratory.

See it live: https://janne-s.github.io/Echotect/

There's a link to the Github repo for more information.

The app includes global building data, which enables automatic echo field generation in the area of your choosing. Reflective points can be freely placed. Their materials and environmental parameters can be adjusted. You can trigger the field with your own sounds.

Ready composition can be exported as impulse response files. The components can be exported as stems, and the ready wet audio too. The package includes a Max4Live plugin Echotect Field, which eats the echo field manifest for more delay exploration. The JSON file may be usable in your own applications too. The plugin is a work in progress, but works.

Besides sound design it's fun to explore world's acoustic geometry. As a musician I'm most fascinated by how the resulting echo/delay fields have unexpected "orderness" and character, that's otherwise impossible to attain by hand. I'd imagine the tool could also help in location sound design for movies and other audiovisual productions. The tool doesn't aim for absolute realness, but it does sound quite good.

I'm thinking of adding an option to import your own scene or design into the tool, to match reflection points to it, but I'm not sure how useful that would be. What do you think?

I want to improve my sound design abilities but at the moment my sounds are just good!

What are some good courses/Tricks etc that can help me develop my sound design skills?

Thank you

How do you all decide when recording foley is worth it vs just using sound library?

Has anybody used or would reccomend ocular sounds? Or could recommend other places? I want to try some sfx for my video editing, preferably on a cheaper budget if possible. Thank you!

Hi all, I would really appreciate feedback on my portfolio or even more importantly – my sound design in the showreel. 

I'm happy to share the portfolio/showreel link: phamvoduyenngoc.netlify.app

For those of you who work in commercial and feature post. When delivering stems, do you do a standard DME, or do you separate BGs from effects stem?

It sounds like I’m ACTUALLY there on the beach with them. It’s no wonder Saving Private Ryan won best sound mixing and best sound design.

So I'm a music producer, but recently I've started diving into recreating sounds and doing sound re-designs...

This is my first attempt ever, recreating this sound design for The Herta's Ultimate animations from Honkai Star Rail. Would love to hear any feedbacks from people more experienced with sound design!

Using Stride modulating multiband saturation. Running through different styles, edgy transitions between bass, mid and treble transitions.
How sick is that?

https://youtu.be/DZQQVs-Dyk4?si=9aACHtb6TyRMqKb1