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   Sound Effects Review
   SoundFX III
 
   Publisher: Digital Juice
   Website: http://www.digitaljuice.com
   Platform: Windows & Mac
   Description: Sound Effects Collection

   MSRP: $399

   Examples: Click Here

   Video Clips: Feel Your Sound
   An Inside Job, The Making of SFX3

   Expected Release: Available Now
   Review Date: March 1, 2008
   Reviewed By: Charles Biddle

Final Score:
9.5

If you’re not familiar with Digital Juice, originally founded as Dimension Technologies Media Group in 1992 by David Hebel, you may be missing out on some the highest quality and best priced graphics and audio offerings available to a producer today.

Renamed Digital Juice in 1997, Digital Juice has carved its way into both small and large audio, visual, and print production markets as an answer for what to do when you need a motion background, sound track, or print graphic, but can’t afford the time or money to create your own.

Digital Juice creates royalty-free content for television, film and video producers. They offer collections of animated backgrounds, animated graphic sets, animated graphic elements, stock footage, production music and sound effects in DVD-based libraries. Because they are royalty free, you pay once and the content is your to use whenever, however, forever. You can preview their full line of products at http://www.digitaljuice.com.

Digital Juice has taken the audio effects genre to the next level with a complete set of sound effects that is now spread out over three gigantic volumes (Sound FX I, Sound FX II, and now Sound FX III) consisting of over 35,000 sound effects spread over 134 categories divided into 4 classes: General FX, Human FX, Musical FX and Noise FX. With 24-bit recording sampled at 96 kHz stereo, there is a plethora of effects available at an uncompromising level of quality.

Like all of Digital Juice's StackTraxx and SoundFX libraries, SoundFXIII ships in cloth-lined cases that are very durable and long-lasting.

This month we look at Digital Juice’s SoundFX III (SFX3), the latest addition to the Sound FX library released on October 23, 2007. While a list price of $399 may not seem extremely cheap at first, SFX3 is actually a bargain because of how much is packed into it. SFX3 has more than 10,500 sound effects spread over 134 categories at 24-bit 96 kHz stereo. All files are presented in a lossless WAV format on 10 DVD’s in a hybrid case formed of mesh fabric with a hardboard outer case that’s surprisingly durable. The files can be removed from the disc and copied directly onto your computer with most audio and NLE software, specifically Vegas Pro 8.0b in my case. Simple, easy, and a non-proprietary formatting allow almost anyone to enjoy this high quality, low cost library.

It would be difficult to go any further without mentioning one key item that sets the Digital Juice SFX3 library apart from its competitors: the Juicer 3. Because it’s related directly to the ease of use of this product, we’ll cover it in our next section.

This is the main screen for the Juicer. This is a sampling of what is offered under ambience.

Ease of Use
Digital Juice provides a free file management system called the Juicer 3. Juicer 3 is a free download available from DigitalJuice.com that works with almost all of Digital Juice’s recent offerings. Having a seemingly endless amount of sound effects at your disposal sounds great until you realize that it’s almost impossible to sort through them, much less sample sounds as needed. Digital Juice’s Juicer 3 works as an indexing utility to allow user-entered search terms to return a list of possible matching sound effects. I entered the search word “child” and the Juicer software returned 10 sound effects. While not completely accurate or able to have user defined terms associated with particular sound effects, more often than not the Juicer 3 can return something useful in a matter of seconds that can immediately be clicked and previewed. The sound effects returned were a child grunting, a female child sneezing and spoken dialog from both a male and female in both English and Spanish saying “now is not the time for child’s play.” As a user of the other two volumes of Digital Juice Sound FX, I would like to point out that often the newer volumes tend to both fill gaps from earlier volumes as well as offer entirely new categories of sound effects. A full search of all three volumes in the Juicer returned 59 hits for the search term “child” that ranged from a child laughing, screaming, crying and other adult voiceovers using the term child.

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