Deep-dive on sound

I'd previously had a good experience with Epidemic Sound and was impressed by their library of sounds effects. They seemed to have a lot of what I was looking for and it was a relief to know all the effects I needed would come from one source.

But trawling through old Reddit posts for reviews I noticed a licensing issue. An Epidemic Sound subscriber can use the effects for (largely) whatever they want, including video games, but if that game were to be featured on a reviewer's YouTube channel (or any YouTube channel not operated by the licensee), a licence would be required by that channel owner.

Consequently indie developers hoping for a review from a top influencer now have to add options to their games to disable music and sound to protect the channel owner from ContentID claims from these libraries.

I'm not really sure yet whether this is a huge edge-case that I'll never need to worry about but it seems odd in a sense that a professional game reviewer cannot review a game unless it's muted. It does make you wonder what sort of licensing agreement huge studios have if indeed they utilize library sound effects because this problem doesn't seem to affect gaming channels in the same way.

In any case, looking beyond the likes of Epidemic, Soundstripe, artlist etc, I started to see some good reviews of libraries from Boom, and their sounds are in a different league. I'm checking the licensing agreement here too to see if there are any fundamental differences (a lot of big studios are named on their site) so we'll see what the outcome is.

Anyway, in Spherica, I've added a range of sounds for missile launching and explosions for the alien spacecraft being destroyed. The nice thing about Boom's samples is a lot of their packs include 4 variation sounds in one file. So each missile launch, for example, sounds slightly different from the previous one which makes a huge difference in the realism of the audio.