We’ve reviewed the Creatures library, we’ve reviewed the Dehumaniser and now we will continue the creature design tradition and review a bit of an older sound effects library from Boom library called “Wild Cats”. Animal sounds next to sound designer skills are perhaps one of the most essential components of designing a good creature sound, be it growl, rumble, screech or anything else you can drag out of the darker depths of your imagination. Will this library help you achieve your goal or should you send this one back to whence it came? Let’s take a peak.
CONTENT
Wild Cats comes as a 3.4 GB bundle of various growls, roars, sniffs, snarls and moans of four wild animals and like the title suggests those are Lions, Lionesses, Cougars and Tigers. Unlike “Creatures bundle” we reviewed this library doesn’t include any construction kits or designed elements so it will be up to a sound designer to edit the sounds to their liking which is probably what you want from this kind of library. All though animal sounds are widely used in creature design, I will review this library with that in mind.
Here is a brief overview of the sounds you will be getting:
Lion: eating, gargle, growl, snarl, sniff, roar.
Tiger: breath, moan, chuff, roar, snarl.
Lioness: roar, snarl, breath, growl, sniff
Cougar: squeak.
Metadata
Boom library as always includes extensive metadata with their Wild Cats library (Soundminer) which is nice since it will keep your sounds organized if you are using Soundminer. However if you don’t use Soundminer but you are using similar software Wild Cats also come with separate data sheet that you can use in your preferred software (you will probably have to enter the values yourself if the software doesn’t have any import function).
Files and folders are also named appropriately, so browsing and searching for the files shouldn’t be that difficult.
SOUND QUALITY
Wild Cats is recorded at 192 kHz with a 24 bit depth which gives you all the pitch shifting heaven you will ever need. Boom library used Sound Devices 744T with a Sennheiser MKH 8050 (going up to 50kHz) and a Sanken CO100K (going up to 100kHz) so the quality of the samples is without a doubt great. You can also read more on how Boom library recorded these untamed felines in our interview here on The Audio Spotlight.
In addition you will also receive a 48 kHz, 24 bit version of the same samples which is good for quick browsing. If you own any of their libraries you will probably agree that Boom library excels in terms of quality.
Value vs Price
Wild Cats will set you back for around 149 € which isn’t that cheap, considering you are buying a specialized library. However, the quality and the content make up for the price. If you are in need of a wild cat library then this library is definitely worth checking out but if you need only few sounds of wild cats/animals then you might want to look at some stock audio files. The only thing I would like to see in Boom library releases is the option to buy individual group of sounds and sample rates. So for instance if I already have a lion sound and only want to purchase a tiger sound it would be nice to have that option.
Conclusion
In short Wild Cats is a great library if you are in need of this sort of sounds. The quality doesn’t disappoint and there is plenty of content and sound variations to give you absolute freedom in sound design being the creature design or other.