Turtlerock Forum

This amazingly talented sound designer/editor I have known for many years , John Patterson, has put together the first comprehensive collection of Australian sound effects totally drawn from existing professional production recordings.
As far as I know - this is a first.
There has been many times in the past where I have been working on a film or project that I have wanted solely Australian sounds, and cant find much at all, and now we all have a huge library to choose from.

Basically he combined five major sound effects recording collections which had been put together by Sydney’s leading film editing and sound post-production houses between the 1960s and the 1990s with his own vast collection of digital Australian sound effect recordings, and then spent more than ten years trawling the best out of those collections and editing, restoring and mastering the sounds to ensure they sound great and remain useful for years and decades to come. 

It’s a pretty massive collection – there’s more than 8000 sounds with a running time of almost 62 hours covering pretty much everything you’d expect from a major sound effects library – a huge range of Australian sounds like bush atmospheres, pub atmospheres, frogs, cicadas, schools, etc, as well as explosions, car chases, doors, machines etc –it’s been designed to cover audio post professionals for most of the situations they’re likely to encounter on an Aussie production, but also has a heap of generic sounds that would work in productions from anywhere –all proudly recorded and produced in Australia!

If you need sound effects for any project you are working on you should check this out. http://australiansounds.com.au or google effectarama – it’s well worth a look.

neat idea! Chris the link isn't working. I get the "Error establishing a database connection" message.
I wanted to check if they had a sample of the largerphone..........

Sent Mr Patterson an email - will find out link issue soon.
Lagerphone? - you need to drink more beer Chris, and "accidentally" break the household broom...

Hosting company error - site is up now.

Edit - double post

Great collection there Chris. Glad to see lots of various boat and yacht sounds. Might buy it just for them to play when i'm driving to work. Good to see these there:

Mutton Birds

Toilet 5 Urinate Into Bowl

Tram 3 Melbourne Maintenance

Kombi Van

Motorbike Vintage Royal Enfield 4 Slow Constant Run

Twin Prop Aircraft.......I love the oscillation of the twin prop.

this series pricked my interest........

Vibrator 1 On Run Off Fat Fluctuating
Vibrator 2 On Run Off Fat Constant
Vibrator 3 On Run Off Fat & Flabby
Vibrator 4 On Run Off Fluctuating
Vibrator 5 On Run Off Constant

............????


........no Hill's Hoist though and no Largerphone, so there is still a niche in the market.

It's a bit odd that they're at 44.1k and not 48k.

i bought one of his cd's a while ago, cool haha

The 44.1 vs 48k question really relates to historical film industry standards - IE - all SFX library's were 44.1k (CD mainly) - and a huge proportion of recorded material was done at 44.1 - dats etc.
During transfers of analog tape recordings and library's for digital preservation, all of these again were done at 44.1 at film post production studios.

Many film audio professionals held a vast bulk of their source material at 44k and continued to do so for consistencies sake.
Unfortunately , we cant change historical technical standards, and practices.
Obviously now most work at 48k (and some at 96k) - but they often still access SFX librarys at 44.1k for their productions.

Interesting Chris. But DAT always supported 48k, so I'm still curious.

Hi David - here is Johns detailed answer to me on this question:

A consequence of historical technical limitations and standard practices.

- The project was started when compact discs were the only available medium for distribution and was originally intended to be released as a cd library.Naturally I had to be consistent in my approach to the file specs throughout the project - I couldn't offer a product with varying sample rates, particularly as very few digital audio workstations from the 20th century could reproduce two different sample rate in the one project. Compact disc libraries were the main source of sound fx for most film sound post people worldwide back in the late 20th century, and.as a result 44k became established as the standard most professionals in Sydney used on their early workstations, and thus also the standard used when they migrated analog to digital or made early dat recordings in the late 1980s and the 1990s. 48k did not really establish itself as the normal professional sample rate until the late 90s/early 21st century, mainly as a result of broadcast standards established overseas at the time, and also because some early portable dat recorders only offered 48 as an option, probably because that was the standard that became established in Japan or America (where the machines came from) around that time. By that stage many film audio professionals held a vast bulk of their source material at 44k and continued to do so for consistencies sake.

- In the early days of digital audio workstations, hard disc space was at a (very expensive) premium and believe it or not the 10% disc space saving carried some weight in many peoples decision to initially soundtrack films at 44k even when 48k was an option.

- For the vast bulk of the library (the analog sourced component) 44k is superior to the source recording quality anyway.

- It's worth remembering that this isn't music, and that the bulk of the sounds in the collection had little or no content above 22khz when they occurred in the real world anyway - the vast bulk of the sounds energy is in the audible spectrum. The analog material was recorded on Nagra, which was the world standard at the time for high quality location recording, and the digital recorded material was usually recorded with an extremely high quality microphone shotgun (either Sanken, Schoeps or Sennheiser) which are able to capture all the nuance, energy and dynamic range of most real world events.

- With well recorded material which is restored and mastered intelligently, 44k material sounds great (listen to the awesome quality modern music mastering technology can pull from an audio cd for example) and sits perfectly within a 48k project with no perceptible audible difference.

- 96k/24 bit location recording is a relatively recent recording phenomenon, and it will take 96k recordists many many years of sound effects recording to build a collection with the breadth and versatility of something like effectarama (or any of the other broad-content based large professional libraries). In the meantime, audio professionals have to use whats available to cover them for those sounds that they can't easily go and record a 96k version of. Its a classic case of the march of technology moving so quickly that it can't keep up with the sheer volume of content in the world - it would be foolish to simply discard all that early content because it still fulfills a very useful purpose. It's much the same as e-reader users having to still read some paper books because an electronic version is not yet available. Most audio professionals to this day still source a huge amount of their material from 44k cd-based sound libraries (because they have no choice), and that material mixes perfectly well within higher sample rate projects.