Soundly is a complete sound effects platform which allows users to easily search through a massive cloud based library, audition sounds and drag and drop them into their preferred DAW. It recently received a significant update, which saw several additional features and an updated interface.

I’ve been using the updated Soundly for a couple of weeks now, and I’ve found it to be a very worthwhile improvement on the previous version. Here’s some of the features which I find the most useful…

Audio Toolbox

There’s a newly added audio toolbox feature at the bottom of the interface, which contains a number of functions which are useful for preparing sound for import. Sounds can be reversed, normalised, summed to mono or have their left and right channels flipped. Often, I’ll use just a portion of a sound from Soundly, so the new fades function is very welcome. Fade in and fade outs can be added and adjusted directly within Soundly. A Mid/Side decoder option is included in the toolbox too.

Spectrogram View

It can be handy to see a representation of the frequency content of a signal over time, so the new spectrogram view allows this to be displayed behind the waveform.

Search Tabs

Although this is quite a basic addition, the search tabs are nevertheless a welcome feature. Additional searches can be added to new tabs when required, allowing you to easily navigate between different searches. I often need to go back to previous searches, so this provides a quick way to do that.

Place It

The Place It feature, previously available within Soundly’s Voice Designer, and as a free standalone plugin is now also available in the Soundly editor. Place allows sounds to be placed in different acoustic settings and it also includes a speaker simulation. Most of the time I’m working in Pro Tools, but sometimes it’s just quicker and easier to do some of the processing in Soundly, as it can save me time having to do it manually in my session. I also find Place It a good option when I’m working on a video edit in Adobe Premiere Pro. I can add reverb in Soundly with Place It and then import it directly to my timeline.

Shape It

There are times when it’s useful to be able to EQ a sound prior to importing it into your DAW. The Shape It feature now incorporates Soundly’s flagship equaliser directly into the Soundly editor. For me, I’ve mostly used this for high and low pass filters. The spectral display within the EQ show the original frequency content, along with the frequency content after equalisation, allowing a visual comparison to be made.

Send To Button

Soundly has custom integration with a broad range of DAWs and game engines, including Pro Tools, Logic, Studio One, Premiere Pro, Nuendo, Cubase, Reaper, After Effects, Wwise, FMOD Studio, and Final Cut Pro. It’s easy to import sound from Soundly using the new Send To menu at the bottom right hand side of the interface.

Check out my video below to see and hear some of the new Soundly features in action.