After spending over a year working the Future UI sound library, I decided to challenge myself.

The challenge: complete a sound library in a day.

Floppy Disk is that library.

Well, to be fair, I kinda cheated. I'd already recorded and edited the sounds for a game project I'd contributed to earlier in the year (Cerebrate, a neat circuitboard simulator and puzzle game), and with the blessing of the developer (as a courtesy),  set about curating the best sounds for release as a mini sound library.

In the day I gave myself to release the library I:

• Selected, named and organised the 200 or so sounds to be included in the library using the sound database software Soundminer.
• 'Remastered' these sounds, refining the audio clip start/ends and running them through a subtle mastering chain to improve their quality and clarity.
• Designed the cover image (sometimes this can take days alone).
• Made a preview audio track.
• Wrote product copy and uploaded images, the preview track and the product itself.
• Poured a refreshing glass of iced coffee knowing I'd completed the challenge*
  (* except for the bit where I cheated and did most of the work beforehand)

The recording and editing process probably took another handful of hours but all in all not a bad attempt at producing a library quickly.

Of course pure foley/recorded libraries require far less work than libraries like Future UI where everything is designed and synthesised from scratch, and often a single sound is actually many layers of original material combined, and then naming sounds that don't exist in reality is a whole other thing. What do you call an invented sound that goes "biiiewwooww-zzchht-bing!!" and could be used in many contexts? That's the sort of thing I asked myself 800 times over when working on Future UI, so it was nice to be able to name files "Floppy disk drop" "Insert floppy disk into drive" and so on to give my noggin' a rest.

If you'd like more stream-of-conciousness ramblings about how I make sound libraries, check out my blog.