I Beat the Juicer!

M

msorrels

Well-known member
Over the years I've collected a few sound effect libraries, mostly random CDs/DVDs/downloads. One of the libraries I did pick up is all four volumes of Digital Juice's SoundFX. The price was right and the quality seemed really high. But in all the many years I've owned it I've only used it a few times. Not because the sound I wanted was or wasn't inside of it -- I didn't use it because the Jucier database software is pretty much unusable. The requirement of using the Juicer (and it's very broken search engine) and the fact it had no way to work with a complete copy of the DVDs on a hard drive meant that the process of using it involved so many steps it was never worth it.

After completing a recent project, where having those four SoundFX libraries available and searchable would have actually helped, I decided it was time to do something about it. The Juicer uses a SQlite database to store all its information about your collection. SQLite databases are very open and easy to work with. There are lots of tools and I have a fairly extensive amount of experience with it. It wasn't that hard to figure out their database table format. This gave me a mapping from the file names they used on disc, things like 47267_SFX.wav and the actual name (in this case Slow Thunder). So I wrote a PHP script (yes it's a scripting language you can run locally on your PC) to open the Juicer database, extract the mapping between nice names and the filenames, then walks a directory and rename any files it finds that match. So for example:

47267_SFX.wav
47266_SFX.wav
47265_SFX.wav
47264_SFX.wav
47263_SFX.wav
​


Becomes

47267_SFX_Slow Thunder.wav
47266_SFX_Science Fiction Laser Space Ship.wav
47265_SFX_Science Fiction Blaster Shield Deflector.wav
47264_SFX_Multimedia Laser Blast Sweeper Glitch.wav
47263_SFX_Multimedia Beep Squeaky Feedback.wav
​


And everything stays in the directory structure (which was already decent).

I then whipped up a tiny batch file that would wait for a key press, then copy a DVD to a directory on my hard drive, then when done play a sound and eject the DVD. I ran this on a loop so I could fed each of the many DVDs in the 4 volumes of the SoundFX library to my hard drive, producing one giant 202GB directory of badly named sounds. I then ran my PHP script which renamed everything into names that I can now search with IFoundASound or SoundMiner or anything that can index filenames.

There was some other keyword data in the Juicer file but I decided it wasn't worth trying to figure out how to get at that. I didn't want to modify the files in anyway to add more metadata. Just having the full descriptive file names seemed more than enough. It's possible this was a waste of my time, someone else may have already done it or perhaps DJ actually has a solution for this problem and I didn't see it. But I have to admit I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. I beat the Juicer. < insert 05375_SFX_Evil Laugh Male.wav >
 
I've been using Digital Juice products, including sound effects, for at least 7 years and never had a problem with the Juicer. You need to load the previews from the DJ disks before you can listen or watch them. If you want to actually have the DVDs 'on-line' on your HD, just mount an image (iso?) of the DVD on the drive.

I just wish I could use Juicer as a browser for non-DJ material.


Jim
 
Using the ISO method, which I tried, is very painful. The big problem with the Juicer is the search is very broken. Select SoundFX and Type in "Slow Thunder" and see what it finds -- nothing. You'd think it would find the one sound with the words Slow Thunder in the title/description. Instead it returns nothing. I think you can look for only single words. Then when you find them you have to find the right DVD or mount the right ISO then find the file and copy it (with a name that doesn't help you) or use the Juicer to convert the file to another format. Which takes a ton of time and ton of effort. Versus just searching for what you want and drag and dropping it into Premiere or Vegas. The Juicer video search aren't as bad as the SoundFX library search, but the ingest is still very painful.
 
You're lucky those DJ discs still work. I bought one of the Editor's Toolkits from them some years back and after 3-4 years the 1 or 2 I actually used couldn't even be accessed on my DVD burners/players. Some discs had never even been used at all and they wouldn't work either!
Disc rot? Bad manufacture? Who knows...they were stored properly in their albums and all other CD/DVD suff from other developers at the time works fine.
Their response: "We don't support those anymore".
Haven't trusted their stuff since.
Mini-rant over.
Ken
 
Should have been more clear. Getting at the keywords was/is very easy. The problem is what to do with them after you have them. I decided it wasn't really worth trying to figure out a compatible way to embedded that data in the wave files.

And yes, reading the discs was kind of difficult. My script used Robocopy for the actual file copying and it often would have to re-try a file more than once to get it to read. Several discs failed and required cleaning and re-trying, but nothing completely failed. It's another reason I wanted to online the whole thing.
 
I feel like I need to qualify my "never had a problem with the Juicer" statement. Since the Juicer is free, my expectations were pretty low. It does the job, but has some limitations.

Then again, does anyone have a really good browser for video/audio material?


Jim
 
Couple of things, the Juicer is a pain so I'm with you there. But you mentioned SoundMiner and they have soundminer files you can import and get all the metadata. I then did a few things. First I embedded the metadata in the files (SM does this) and then SR converted the whole thing and exported with names based off the description and the file number. So basically what you did except I have more metadata and I used Soundminer to do it.

For the doubters, Juicer is not a good search engine, and you either need to use the DVD's or create disk images and load them for it to work. Which is klunky and slow. And everything takes longer since they are at a silly 96k sample rate. I few (VERY few) of the sounds you may find useful to slow way down but other wise 96 is a waste of space. And you HAVE to use the Juicer since they decided not to name the files with anything useful. So searching DJ' sounds is a separate task from searching your own library. If your looking for a big wooden door close you want to search once with one piece of software not twice with two. And if you are using something like Soundminer that will copy the sound directly into your time line it's a pain to use something like Juicer that will copy to a directory and then you can bring it into your DAW/NLE.

Also I have found that Jucer forgets every once in awhile the disks that have been scanned in and I have to rescan them.

As you might guess I would recommend Soundminer for sound libraries, don't know a good one for visuals.
 
I didn't see any Soundminer data files, but I'll admit I didn't spend a lot of time looking. That might have saved me some time, but what I have now is very nice. With real file names I can tell what things are by name in my editor. And IFoundASound is working well enough for me that I went ahead and bought it. I now have all the DJ SoundFX sounds on a hard drive I don't care what happens to that vast pile of DVD's, 250gigs of disc space is nothing. And all the software I use can happily mix the 96k files into projects, so I don't have to spend time converting things before I use it.

For Video I think the closest you can get is Adobe Bridge. Though I've never really used it much. I tried to use it for my sound effect library but it just didn't work the way I wanted it to. ACADSee also might work for video, though I haven't looked at it in a long time, I bought an early version of it but that was 10 years ago.
 
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