Who needs it?

SoundFisher is intended for anyone who works with sound effects and would like a flexible software application to help them store, categorize, and retrieve the sounds. It is ideal for people who create, use or share, or maintain large collections of sound effects. The term "sound effect" refers to either short sound events, such as gunshots, footsteps, glass-breaking, brief sounds of animals, etc., or long homogeneous sounds, for example sounds of rain on pavement or recordings of a babbling brook.

SoundFisher is a sound database management system and browser. It enables you to retrieve sounds using the widest variety of query attributes and techniques available in similar products today. In fact, some of SoundFisher's search capabilities are totally unique.

It is the only product of its kind to offer "Sounds-Like" searching, made possible through Muscle Fish and Audible Magic's audio content-based recognition and retrieval technology.

SoundFisher begins by analyzing digital sound files, computing and extracting a  combination of descriptive attributes. These attributes are stored in a database and are subsequently referenced during the sound retrieval and comparison process. The attributes, or meta data, include audio-content properties (e.g., approximate pitch, duration, loudness, overall timbre), as well as simple sound file properties (e.g., sample rate, file format, number of channels, creation date, etc.). Generally, we refer to the former components in sounds-like queries, while the latter are used in more traditional file-related queries. 

SoundFisher is particularly well suited to handling sound files that are stored on local or network disk file systems, on CD-ROM, or on the Internet. SoundFisher can create "thumbnail" (proxy) versions of the sound files that are added to the system, therefore it's not imperative that the original sound files be stored permanently online. The application can play the sound files (or the their proxies) directly once they are retrieved via the user's query, even if the original sound is not online. The current Mac version will automatically detect the presence of built-in and Digidesign sound hardware and permit the user to select which system to use for playback. The Windows version plays sound through all SoundBlaster-16 compatible soundcards. 

SoundFisher is a multiplatform application which runs on either Mac OS or Microsoft Windows. It's possible for two or more users to share or maintain private SoundFisher databases.

SoundFisher is not intended as a search mechanism for music catalogs. The automatic sound-analysis techniques and the resulting attributes that are extracted -- particularly the "sounds-like" properties -- are not musically oriented. In other words, they do not address sound at the level of the musical phrase, melody, rhythm or tempo. It is also not adapted to speech recognition or speaker identification tasks, although occasionally and under very specific (usually impractical) situations, SoundFisher may provide some utility for music and speech-related sound management.

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