Soundly Sound Browsing App Updates with “Cloud Storage Freedom”, Refreshed Design, More

Recently an email arrived in my inbox with an update to the Soundly asset management software. I’ve been using Soundly since its launch in 2016, so I was curious to learn what the team had cooked up.

It’s been a while since we looked at Soundly here on the blog. Today’s post takes a look at what’s new in the 2021.09 release, and gets us caught up on how Soundly has evolved.

At the end of the article I’ll also share a Soundly promo code for one free month of Soundly Pro, so check it out!

Contents hide

What Is Soundly?

Soundly Details Explored

What’s New in Soundly 2021.09?

Other Recent Updates to Soundly

Soundly Pro Promo Code

What Is Soundly?

Soundly is a desktop app (Windows 10 and 11, MacOS 10.10+, with further legacy support) that allows browsing collections of sound clips. It lets users add their libraries of sound effects, search and find clips, and transfer them instantly to editing apps via spot-to-track or drag-and-drop.

In addition to managing sound collections, Soundly also bakes in metadata support, an integrated sound library marketplace, curated themes of sounds, cloud storage and streaming, and more.

What set Soundly apart from other sound asset management systems was its model: free to use with reasonable limits with an optional paid plan that provides expanded features, cloud storage, and an ever-growing bundled sound effect library.

Soundly Details Explored

Soundly’s free version supports 2,500 local files at a time. It’s not a hard lock, so the database can be reset to add 2,500 fresh files if desired – useful for sound library vendors who wish to write metadata for their effects. Soundly Free includes all metadata features, and grants access to the Soundly Free cloud library of 3,000 sound effects.

An upgrade to the Soundly Pro plan ($14.99 a month ($12.49 a month if paid yearly), $9.99 a day) erases the local file limit, and unlocks access to the Soundly Pro cloud library of roughly 70,000 sounds.

Soundly also offers Soundly Collections. These are “playlists” of hand-picked sound effects in focused themes: “Car Chase”, “Horror”, “Prison”, and others. For anyone that’s had to sift through thousands of effects one-by-one, the Soundly Collections are a great way to gather popular sound effects for beginners or casual sound fans.

Peder Jorgensen of Soundly explained more:

We continuously add new Soundly collections. Right now, we are in the process of updating our already existing Soundly collections with new sounds that we have recorded recently, and when we're happy, we'll start adding more collections. As the holidays are approaching, I think my favorite collection is the Christmas collection, and I use it a lot when doing Christmas commercials. It's also worth mentioning users can create their own collections, and we think it's a great way to organize your sound library with favorites and things you use often.

What’s New in Soundly 2021.09?

So what has Soundly included in their recent release?

The most significant addition to the 2021.09 update is the Cloud Storage Freedom option. This allows users to connect Soundly with Google Drive or Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) in order to store and stream collections from their own personal cloud.

: Cloud Options

: Adding Google Drive

: Google Drive Code

This allows users to use their own Drive or S3 credentials and bypasses the need to use Soundly’s Cloud Storage. It’s a helpful way to control cloud costs and sound library management on a more granular level.

For the sound librarians in the crowd, Soundly now features a metadata import option. This allows assigning metadata to files that have already been added.

: Metadata Import

: Select Import File

: Metadata Import Summary

: Before Import

: After Import

: Import File Example

Version 2021.09 now allows users to open sounds in an external editor, with the additional option to open the file as a copy, or to edit the original.

: Add an External Editor

: Copy or Open Original

Another helpful addition is the ability to reference original files. This allows editing apps to use master copies of sounds even if stored elsewhere, instead of making a copy each time a sample is transferred to a DAW.

More handy features include sum to mono and musical pitching in precise semitones, and there are others you can read about in the announcement blog post.

Jorgensen shared with me some other updates:

We have updated Soundly's framework, making Soundly a lot smoother and faster than a few years ago, and we recently did some design updates as well. Advanced search options with support for searching in your language (built-in translation) is a feature we are proud of and that a lot of our non-native English users find very helpful.

Better accessibility support and a great help section on our website are also worth mentioning.

And of course, the release of the Soundly Perfume has been an essential milestone in the development of Soundly.

Other Recent Updates to Soundly

For those of you catching up on what else Soundly has been up to, here’s a quick list of features that have been added to the sound browsing app recently:

UCS support
Support for spotting files to Nuendo 11, Cubase 11, and Logic
Activity list
Export options: gain, naming wildcards
Search within collections
Multichannel 7.1 playback
Soundly Monitor AAX plug-in for monitoring multi-channels in Pro Tools

Soundly Pro Promo Code

The Soundly team has kindly created a promo code for Creative Field Recording readers. Use the code creativefieldrecording for one free month of Soundly Pro.

Once in Soundly, click “Register”, enter the code, then click “Select Plan”. You’ll get the free month after the transaction.