What Makes A Good Submission/The Sounds Resource

The Sound

Make Sure It's Not Music

The Sounds Resource is for Sound Effects only. Music usually has a lot more complexities in terms of how we can go about providing it, specifically because many games use licensed songs or sell their soundtracks on in other media.

Note: We also cannot accept instrument samples, as they are what form the music and are not sound effects anyway, so please make sure that your submissions don't contain any.

Story Dialogue

Story dialogue (e.g. long clips of conversational audio from cutscenes) is also no longer accepted. In general, these submissions were almost exclusively huge, unorganized zips full of unlabeled files consisting of hours and gigabytes of audio that was relatively useless to the general user (compared with short sound effects). The time and effort involved for staff to review them combined with the huge amount of storage requirements for very little benefit resulted in our decision to no longer accept submissions of this type.

File Formats

While you can only submit .zip archives to the site, the actual audio files within your zips must be in .wav format.

If the files are originally in .mp3 or .ogg, these are also accepted. However, do not convert .wav files to .mp3 or .ogg; these formats are lossy and conversion to them degrades the sound quality. Also, do not convert .mp3 or .ogg files to .wav; this simply creates larger files without any improvement in said quality. The only exception is if you are ripping an fsb file for as of now getting oggs ripped from said fsb files with their headers is impossible.

.mp2 files should not be converted to .wav either as they provide the same result with converting .mp3s or .oggs. Rather, just submit them as is.

.m4a files are acceptable as long as they are the base formats that the game uses.

The Sound Pack

Get Everything You Can

While this isn't strictly required, we do need sound packs to be "as complete as possible". Getting the most amount of sounds possible from a game is more rewarding for both you, as the submitter, and for the users that download the network's submissions. This enables them to put more of the hosted sound assets to good usage. Some games may have tools that do not 100% support the full extraction of every single sound file from a game's archive; that is fine. Just do your best to make sure you grab every sound file you can to make your submission as complete as possible.

Credit Tags

If you want to include a credit tag, simply include a small .txt file with any information you wish to provide. Some information you may wish to include will be:

Name: You can include your name if you want. It's not really required as we store your name in our database anyway, seen below the download button.

Credit: Some people want to be credited when somebody uses their ripped sound effects, normally by writing "Give credit if used". Some people will also write "Credit not required". It's your choice whether you want to request credit or not, though we advise that you don't ask for it.

Just remember that not including a tag is also more than acceptable. It's quite likely that many people will simply ignore a tag, which is why the trend lately has been to simply not include one. This is of course your own personal preference.

Organization

We require all sound packs to have a minimum basis of organization. As a submitter, we ask of you to provided some organization when submitting. If you have a large folder of sounds, please split them into one folder labeled "Voices" and one folder "Sounds" (if applicable) to provide a basis of organization. This makes it easier on both the site-staff in processing your submission, as well as our users to consume your provided assets and hard-work at a greater level. Submissions labeled "All Sounds" or "Everything" will not be accepted to the network, as they are not organized enough for our user-base to gain usage out of the provided assets, and make the provided submissions seem lazy. Regardless of whether your sound files are named or not, it is minimally required for you to separate your sound files into these two categories if possible.

As well, we recommend that if you can organize your sound assets into multiple categories, that you do so! It helps the staff to be able to see what kinds of sounds are supposed to belong to certain categories, and as well allows users to find certain sounds they are looking for easier. Of course this is more of a generosity than a requirement, but would be amazing if you could put in the extra effort to do so! As a bare minimum, it is required that you split the submission into at least "Voices" and "Sounds", if applicable.

Zipping Your Submissions

The site only accepts .zip file submissions. Please only include the sound effects and a credit tag, if you wish to include one. Any additional files just add space needlessly and detract from the quality of your submission. You can create the .zip file with any application you wish. Some common applications used are "7-zip" and "WinRar". When splitting a big folder of sounds into multiple smaller parts, it is recommended that you keep each sub-folder of sounds at around 100MB to allow for users to download it easier. While of course this is a recommendation, the max file size you can upload of a ZIP is 250MB. Subsequently, if you have a folder of sounds that go above this limit, you must split them into smaller folders to accommodate to the upload limit.

Common Rejection Reasons (And How to Avoid Them)

Here is a list of common reasons as to why your sound pack(s) may be rejected to our network:

• Duplicate: There is already an existing sound pack provided for this category of both game and sound type (Whether it be from another console, or from the same game)

• Incorrect Format: You did not submit the correct file format for your sounds. They must be in a base format of WAV (or MP3/OGG if the game's sounds were originally in these formats.)

• Incomplete Pack: The sound pack is incomplete. This usually doesn't come up as a reason, unless noticeable components to your sound pack are missing (Such as several voice lines for a character). Just follow the rule of getting as many sounds as possible for your submission.

• Invalid Files: The provided files are either corrupt or broken. This reason is applicable to: Empty sounds (Sounds that are purely silence), Static sounding files, and files that do not play in a standard media player. The way to prevent this reason is to listen to each sound before you decide to submit your pack up to the site, and double check for any issues that may occur after conversion.

• Low-Quality Sound Pack: The method used to convert the provided sound files lacks quality, and makes the provided resources not salvageable. These issues can arise when you convert from a lossy/compressed audio format(Quality reduction) to a lossless/uncompressed format. Lossy audio formats reduce quality each time you convert to them take away the quality of the data, making the sounds less usable. Never convert from lossy to lossless (Example being MP3 to WAV). If the files are originally in a lossy format (Such as OGG Vorbis), leave it in that corresponding sound format.

• Music: The sound pack contains music. Simply put, these music files must be dis-included from your submission, as we do not host music for legal purposes. (As well, it is called "The Sounds Resource", right?)

• Stolen: The sound pack you provided was stolen from another source/Is not ripped by you. We take this offense seriously, and do not tolerate stolen submissions. If you submit stolen content, it may result in you having your submission privileges revoked and or being banned from the site. Don't do it.

• Spam: The sound pack you uploaded was a troll submission. Please do not upload useless submissions to our site, as they will automatically be rejected, and you may have your submission privileges revoked.

Any other rejection reasons not seen above are hand-written by the staff team. There may be an issue that isn't described by the above rejection reasons, so we attempt to specify any issue(s) your submission has, and how we can advise you to fix it upon re-submission. After having a submission rejected, if you still struggle to fix the issue(s) as relayed in your rejection private message, feel free to message the staff member that rejected your submission and ask for assistance. The staff member who responds will more than likely be willing to help you in anyway possible!