Blowout Bargain: 10,000 Sounds for $10

Podcast producer Daniel Steinberg has a unique audio editing technique: he uses a Wacom pen controller in one hand and a Countour Design Shuttle controller in the other. I asked him to write a tutorial on his system, which obviously works well because he cranks out a huge amount of high-quality material. We hope to have it online soon.

In the meantime, I was intrigued enough to order my own Wacom pad. DealNews.com found them on sale at J&R Music, so in bargain-hunter mode, I also peeked at the site's audio clearance section, where I found this beauty: 8GB of royalty-free WAV files for $9.97.

For ten bucks, I got 10,000 royalty-free sounds in WAV format. The catch? Using them on commercial productions requires displaying the Magix logo.

The Magix Sound Pool Collection 2005 DVD is listed as a Windows product, but in reality it's a two-sided DVD containing 10,282 16-bit WAV files and a handful of documents designed to import those files into Magix's music-arranging programs. I had no problem loading them into my Mac.

The package arrived today and I've been plowing through the sounds with RapidPreview. (I'll soon switch to AudioFinder, which has a killer rename-by-BPM feature.) Many of the sounds are goofy, and the pitched ones are often repeated in six keys, but at a tenth of a penny a piece, I'm still smiling.

What audio bargains have you found lately?