More ridiculous nonsense from Spectrasonics...

Hi Guys,

Lots of misinformation here, so I wanted to jump in to clarify about using Omnisphere for Sound Design. Hopefully, this can help clear things up about our policies, how they work in practice and the thinking that goes into them:

1. Omnisphere absolutely CAN be used for SFX/Sound Design applications and is widely used by many of the top sound designers legally and with our blessing. In fact, the Hobbit film is using Omnisphere a lot for SFX in the film and we are featuring this on our website right now...so it's no secret. :-)

2. Just for background, keep in mind that Omnisphere was designed for music production and the standard license covers that type of use with no verification from Spectrasonics. We have a large user base of music producers and that's our primary business.

Since SFX use is a much wider field that includes things like industrial applications, various types of embedding in games, soundmark logos, mobile app development, etc, etc....we do require that our non-music production users check with us on using Omnisphere for SFX purposes - in an effort to have that conversation about their project/type of work and if the standard license covers it or an additional license would be required.

Since the SFX applications are constantly changing (ringtones, games, web uses, apps, etc), this is an important conversation to have with the user.

This is why we prefer to approve non-musical use case-by-case instead of trying to come up with a document to cover all possible uses.

Perhaps we will be able to design a FAQ for SFX use that covers every conceivable application in the future, but so far that has been elusive and handling them directly per user has been more effective for us.

We'll keep thinking about this to make our service to the Sound Design community better.

BTW, case-by-case doesn't necessarily mean that we have to clear every single sound on every project. Obviously, many SFX projects are similar in nature and wouldn't require special approval each time. What's more important to us is to have that dialog with the sound designer about the type of work that it is.....similar projects do not need special clearance once it's been given.

3. Most SFX use requests are quickly approved under the standard license.

We try to be as flexible as possible with the standard license in how we allow the SFX uses. Sometimes, the requested use clearly goes outside the standard license and we have to arrange a custom license.

Here are a few examples where we determined that the standard license did NOT cover the usage:

• One of the number one selling video games in the world wanted to use our straight samples as all the buttons noises for a certain level of the game.

• One of the largest corporations in the world wanted to use our samples for the startup sound of their mass market, well-known hardware product.

• Someone wanted to use samples of Omnisphere's multi samples for all the embedded audio in a music app for the iPad.

• The CEO of a well-known car company fell in love with a sample from one of our products and wanted to use it as the corporate logo for the whole company.

Each of these situations were brand new when we received them and clearly required us to arrange a special license, which we did. We are getting new types of requests that we never considered all the time, so that's why we handle SFX on a case-by-case basis.

Hope that's helpful!

Cheers,

Eric Persing
Spectrasonics

Originally Posted by Hypnotic View Post Could somebody explain to me why it matters if its a video game vs a movie? I don't understand this.

The reason is the raw sound effect is packaged with the game files and can be pulled from a zipped format file by any end user.

lso, the amount of times an effect is used in a film is known, therefore easier to negotiate a fee. In games, nobody knows how many times an effect might be heard; it depends on how the user plays the game.