Article by: Sebastian Storvik — Nov 11 2024

Soundly: The fellowship of the “ring ring”

Once upon a time, in a faraway land, there was a young man in distress. The time being 2015, the faraway land being Norway, and the young man being Peder.

Peder was a sound designer and a developer, and back in the ancient days of the early 2010s, finding sounds was a hassle. You could make them yourself, buy hard drives and CDs(??) - or download horrific audio from your favorite torrent-site. It was hard work, and expensive. Two things the hobbit of our story hated.

Peder, having developed computer games, thought “aha, yes, this is my dragon to slay, this is my quest.”

Thus, he began forging his weapon: The Complete Sound Effects Platform… which at the time was called Soundify. Early users with some sort of flawed eyesight pointed out a slight resemblance in naming and design to a Swedish music platform that lived just across the border.

“I have my platform, and my library – but alas, I am muted, I have no sounds” Peder thought, and said aloud, ironically.

So he went out into the world looking for audio. But what he found was even better. He found Chris, a veteran sound designer with a large backpack - and in that backpack, hard drives with 3000 sounds of epic quality.

“So how’s your back carrying all those hard drives around, Sir?” Peder enquired.

“Well, it’s getting heavier by the day, young man.” Chris said, with his eyebrow raised.

“What if I told you we could put those sounds in the cloud, and you wouldn’t have to carry that backpack around.”

“Magic! Burn the Witch!!!” Chris shouted, and pointed furiously.

“No, no! There is no cloud, it’s just someone else’s computer.” Peder said, and explained the dark art of cloud computing.

Data files met software, a match made in heav… the cloud… on earth? Anyway, Soundly was ready.

– We started out with 3000 sounds, simple UX, and a drag-and-drop feature. Which is the core of what Soundly is today as well. Interestingly, when creating our first video before the release, the Director suggested making the application window hide when you drag-and-drop. We thought it was a good idea, and implemented it. I think that made the app 100% better. We try our best to listen to our users, they know what they want and need, says Peder.

Now You Can Walk Into More Door

The first Soundly employee was Joachim. The most organized sound designer in Oslo, and that’s not saying much to be honest. He started out with a small library of 3000 sound effects, and by using his dexterous green thumbs he made it grow and more than double in size in a year, and from there it has doubled and doubled. Now we have more cats, more whooshes, more footsteps, and more doors.

Spreading the Soundly word

In 2017 Erling joined the team, taking on the duty of preaching the word of Soundly far and wide.

Soundly started sending out newsletters that were supposed to be monthly, but being infamously horrendous at meeting deadlines, they ended up being random. Sometimes two in one month, more often one each quarter.

– These days there is so much new stuff coming out that we have a hard time finding good slots to send it out, but back then, we sometimes had to make up news as a proof of life.

Speaking about being alive, Soundly’s social media presence was so sparse that people thought the company had gone off grid. Then Erling, through sheer will, revived their Facebook account and even set up more, more, and more social accounts to feed our need for attention!

Erling polished text, created a new beautiful webpage, and a new support system - helping the support-powerhouse Vegard.

Support & contact in the world’s loudest library

Believe it or not, Soundly hasn’t always been the gem it is today. This is the result of years of cooperation between you, our users, and us.

Now, in the beginning Soundly didn’t really have a support system. This is because users back in the day didn’t need support. Hard times created hard men, and these hard men were able to squish any bug that came in their way of enjoying sounds of cats meowing on their computer. Like hard men do.

As previously mentioned, in 2018 Soundly somehow felt the need to get a support-system in place. That powerhouse support system is called Vegard, and he was ready to rumble.

– I’m guessing we’ve solely gotten positive feedback from our fantastic user base. And only ever rarely a well founded complaint, right, Vegard?

– We’ve been blessed with an overwhelming amount of positive feedback, and the only thing that has been somewhat controversial was the release of the Voice Designer. The fear was that we were taking jobs from professional voice actors. The response was pretty muted though, and I think most people who actually used the Voice Designer realized that this was a tool not to replace voice actors in proper voice acting roles, but to test dialog on the fly, and also for very rudimentary filler commentary. i.e. NPCs in games and quick announcements in film and TV.

At Soundly we realize we are a work in progress, and there’s always room for improvement. We like to state this as often as possible because your feedback is valuable to us, and we want you to help us build a better product. Luckily this seems to be working.

– The most common response we get is feature requests. I’d like to think this is because we’re so responsive, and not just because there are so many missing features in Soundly.

Soundly 2.0: Two Tones

2017-2018 marked the transition to Soundly 2.0. Here you can read the unbiased interview Erling did of what was up for version 2.1.

– What made 2.0 different?

– At this point we had improved the tool a lot. Integration with Pro Tools, better support for local files, and better tracking of metadata. We also had cloud storage so users could upload their own sounds, says Peder.

– What have been the biggest challenges for Soundly?

– A lot of features were quite hard to create. The shared network database, and uploading files and metadata in the cloud were both difficult to manage. But they were necessary to improve workflow with Soundly. Our biggest challenge has always been time. We and our users have a lot of good ideas, and the obstacle is choosing what to prioritize. We are recruiting and growing at the moment, but we don’t want to grow too fast because we want to continue being us.

The First Rule of Soundly

– How much fun is too much fun, Erling?

– The first rule of Soundly is we don’t joke about quality of sound. As long as the product and our sounds are of high quality we can joke about everything else. If after watching our marketing your takeaway is “they have quality sounds” and “they’re having fun” then we’ve reached our goal. But the first one is crucial to make the second work.

– Chris, it seems Soundly are renowned in the sound community for humorous videos and projects, always geared towards the sound design community. How do you come up with ideas?

– Everyone is heavily involved in this, and we try to keep Soundly a place where no one is afraid to speak their mind and try out ideas, no matter how stupidly stupid or expensive they might be.

He says the quality of the videos are due to quality people, directors that are part of Soundly’s network.

– Most of us in Soundly are sound designers, and have been lucky to have a long history working with some of the best directors in Norway. We can go past all the ad agencies, just pick up the phone and pitch an idea directly to a director. Plus we have the luxury to give the directors a lot of creative freedom.

Peder explains that The doors film is a great example of this process.

– The idea originated with Vegard in support as he had a few beers with writer/director Jesper Sundnes, and me. We wrote down a rough script, and it was still funny the next day when we woke up. Jesper knew Martin Starr from working as a script writer on various films, so he just sent him an email. He liked the script and was randomly going to Norway a few weeks later, so we just shot the film and released it.

On the list of stupid things we’ve done that Erling is particularly fond of, is the release of Emotions.

– A sound effects company releasing a perfume was as dumb as it could get, and as with everything we do, we do it properly. We did testing of many different fragrances and landed on a unisex perfume that would be perfect for sound designers after a long day in the studio. The release film was directed by Marius Rolfsvåg, who we’ve had the pleasure of working with many times. And released on April 1st. Many thought this was a joke, but the perfume is very real, says Erling.

The Philanthropist

Soundly’s greatest contribution to the world is obviously its wide array of cat sounds. But there have been other things that are, well, borderline philanthropic.

– Our cooperation with CalArts’ Professor Craig Smith in restoring the legendary Wilhelm Scream was awesome. I would also like to mention our project with Sounding Wild. It might not be philanthropic, but at least it’s tropical, close enough, says Joachim.

– Erling, what has been your favorite marketing project for Soundly?

– The Halloween project with the Spookly-webpage. Because it was so stupid, and just fun. It’s as far from “annoying” or “this is just to make money” as you can get, and I think people feel that. It embodies what Soundly is, and will continue to be. We want to make sound designers happy, though quality products, and ridiculous humor.

10 Years

Hans, our Swedish sound designer and work horse joined forces with us in 2020. Since then the sound team has made possibly the best sounding, organized, and original sound library of more than 100 000 sounds. Meticulously recorded by us and our large pool of sound recordists around the world.

In 2023 we celebrated 10 years of Soundlying, and 100 000 sounds with a film - again directed by Marius Rolfsvåg. We wanted to showcase our story and how our recorders work in the field. We were overwhelmed by all the feedback we got from you, and we still go back and read the comments when we need some encouragement.

Part of the Fellowship, Part of the Crew

Since 2020 Soundly has acquired three new, skilled crew members:

Prashant, joined in 2022. He’s coding, leading projects, writing ideas for films, and nicely slid into the role of doing what everyone else does here at Soundly, everything.

Jørgen, coincidently Peder’s brother, is helping out in keeping the nepotism strong in Soundly. Jørgen is doing all the hard-core coding stuff now and is responsible for all the good things that have been implemented for the last few years. Peder is still responsible for the bugs.

Sebastian joined in 2024. Strong, tall, quick witted, humble and with uncanny self awareness. A most captivating wordsmith whomst’d’ve and still has the responsibility of this text, and thus, should get a higher salary.

You Need Sound

Now, “Our Story” has naturally been a lot about us, but as with any extremely profitable company where the owners run away with all the profits, Soundly is nothing without our customers(‘ money).

– Vegard, you’ve spoken to more Soundly users than any other, and the question we’re all wondering is, what do they have in common?

– They need sound effects.

– Right. Intriguing, insightful.

– It’s interesting how many different types of customers we get. Movies, ads, toys, games, podcasts, audio books. Our customers are wide and varied. Most of the original Soundly team came from film and radio, so it’s been really helpful that so many of our customers have reached out with their feedback and thoughts on how to make Soundly work better with the workflow in their fields.

– What has created the most positive feedback?

– During the lockdowns we were suddenly inundated with messages from desperate educators that had to switch over to online education. For many this was outside the budget window, and had to be set up as quickly as possible. We decided to give free access to all the educational institutions who reached out to help in what little ways we could to make a hectic process a bit easier. New features are technically the thing we receive the most positive feedback on, but I think we experienced the most gratefulness when we could help people during such a stressful period. And many of them remain as happy Soundly users to this day.

– How do you like your job?

– It’s hectic but incredibly fun and fulfilling. Being at a place where we can laugh about a silly idea at lunch, and then have it be the basis of a video we shoot a couple of months later really makes you invested in the creative process. Since we’re still a pretty small group of people we all do a lot of different tasks, the days are really varied. I hope that this somehow translates to Soundly and that inspired people make inspiring products.

There you have it, Vegard likes getting your feedback. So if you have any questions or feedback to Soundly, don’t hesitate to reach out.

Thank you for all your support.

Soundly 3.0: The return of the tabs

In March 2024, we released the most significant update to Soundly ever! The New Soundly, or Soundly 3.0, which it is called internally, is our proudest release so far. Years have gone into polishing the design and workflow, and we’ve finally introduced tabs, which you can read about here..

Other features include built in EQ, Audio Toolbox, Spectrogram view, Place it & much more. Everything is designed to ignite your creativity and streamline your sound design process.

– We’re proud. Our last version is really good. It’s all thanks to good feedback from users and our fantastic team here at Soundly. I feel like we’ve finally fixed the biggest pain points for our users. We’ve added features but still kept the app quick and simple to use. The visual design is also way prettier than it was, which is a bonus. Yet we’re always looking to improve, so get in touch if you have feedback, says Peder.

Thus, with his trusted blade, Soundly, he had cleft the dragon’s head in twain. Finally defeating hard workflows, legacy industry, and expensive sound effects.

Yet a hero never rests, and we are already working on new quests!

To be continued…

Have you used Soundly in a major production? We’d love to hear about your experience! If you have a few minutes, please share your story with us here. Your feedback helps shape the future of Soundly. Thank you!