Indie Tools: Soundsnap offers professional-quality, royalty-free sounds

Many indie games developers consider themselves coders and/or game designers first and struggle with art and sound. It's always an option to find and work with a composer or sound designer to have custom sounds made for their games, but that's expensive. There are free sound libraries out there, but not all of them are trustworthy; they might contain copyrighted sounds that could come back to bite a developer in an unpleasant place. Licensing the use of pre-made sounds and music is cheaper than having custom ones made and can be safer than using free ones found online. Soundsnap is a service which licenses sound effects and music for use in all kinds of media royalty-free and at reasonable rates, and the fact that it's used by Hollywood studios and big game companies such as Microsoft and Sony attests to its reliability.

The range of sounds offered by Soundsnap includes music loops and singles as well as a wide variety of sound effects. These are sorted first into broad categories and then into subcategories. The House category, for example, has Bathroom, Buttons and Switches, Clocks, Doors/Windows, Electric Appliances, Kitchen, Other Objects, and Telephone for its subcategories. All sounds can be previewed before being purchased.

In addition to offering an annual subscription that allows for unlimited use of sounds, Soundsnap allows users to purchase credits for set numbers of sounds in bundles, with the price for each individual sound credit ranging from $1.80 per sound at 5 sound credits purchased to $0.75 per sound at 200 sound credits purchased. A game that needs 50 sound effects might require upwards of $100 in sounds, but for developers who don't have high-quality sound recording equipment or the experience to make good use of it, it could be worth the price for the amount of time saved. They also offer educational discounts, so college students looking to get an early start on game development careers can benefit from their extensive sound library at a reduced cost.

Some indie developers are perfectly fine recording their own sounds or using sound generators. For those who aren't, however, or for those who want to supplement the sounds they can easily record themselves, Soundsnap seems like a good option. Soundsnap's staff reportedly reviews every sound submitted to them for copyright violations, with the ones they miss being reported by users, so indie developers should be able to avoid legal knots regarding any sounds licenced through them.

Source: IndieGames.com