What began as a personal project in Oslo in 2012 has since grown into a platform used for Hollywood productions, popular video games, and increasingly by professional creators—editors, and sound designers working on films, TV shows, and games. 

This is the story of Soundly, a sound effects platform with over 200,000 professionally recorded sound effects that serves professional sound designers working on major films and TV shows, as well as emerging YouTubers seeking to elevate their content. With direct integration into industry-standard editing software like Pro Tools and Adobe Premiere, Soundly enables quick access to high-quality, licensed audio.

Soundly emerged from Norwegian music producer and sound designer Peder Jørgensen’s frustration with existing tools. “I needed it myself,” Peder explains. “I needed a quicker workflow.” 

Combining his audio expertise with self-taught programming skills, Peder has built a company that has “been consistently growing about 30% each year since we launched with users and with profits.”

Integration with Creative Workflows

For creators, Soundly eliminates one of the most frustrating aspects of sound design: file management. When working with Premiere, for instance, “you can drag the file directly from the cloud into Premiere and it will be saved in a folder relative to the project,” Peder explains.

This feature helps solve a common problem where projects are shared with missing audio files. “A big problem Premiere users have is that they send the product off, someone opens it, and there are tons of missing files. That happens all the time. So we ensure that when you use Soundly and Premiere, every time you add a sound effect, it gets saved to the right location next to the project. It lives with the project.”

The user experience is intentionally minimalist. “We try to be an application you use as little as possible,” says Peder. “Our goal is to have users use this as little as possible. The less time you spend in Soundly, the better we’ve done in a way.”

Advanced Audio Tools for Creators

While searching for and implementing sound forms, the foundation of Soundly, the platform offers advanced tools that elevate content quality without technical complexity.

“One of the coolest features we released recently is something called ‘Place It,’” Peder shares. This free plugin allows creators to contextualize sounds within specific environments. “Everything’s recorded clean. So it’s like a door closing in just a studio. That’s how we want to record it. But then, when you add it to a film, you want it to sound like the door is in that room,” he explains.

“Place It” enables users to select the acoustic environment they want—whether it’s a cathedral, bathroom, or airplane cabin—and the plugin automatically adjusts the sound accordingly. “If you want a song playing out of the radio in the room, then you can do the radio preset, and it will sound like it’s in a radio in a room,” Peder says, adding texture and realism to productions.

Powering the Creator Economy

For content creators operating across multiple platforms, Soundly addresses several key needs: speed, quality, and legal protection.

“Creators today want to create stuff quickly,” Peder observes. “They need to get a lot out, and it’s just becoming more platforms they need to be on. And suddenly, it’s helping a lot just to do the sound quickly.”

The licensing structure provides another unique advantage. Unlike free sound libraries with inconsistent licensing terms, every sound in Soundly’s library is royalty-free. “Since we create everything ourselves, we own the sounds, we own the library, we can release everything royalty-free, and you will never get a copyright strike on YouTube or anything using our sounds,” Peder assures.

This brings peace of mind, particularly to creators who may not understand the details of audio licensing. The platform offers a free tier with a smaller sound library, while the Pro tier ($15/month) provides complete access to all sounds and features.

From Hollywood to YouTube Applications

Soundly’s user base spans the entire creator spectrum, from Hollywood professionals to independent content creators.

“Our biggest user group is professional creators,” Peder says. “These are the editors working on Hollywood films and TV shows, and the sound designers working on the big games.”

A recent example came during this year’s Game Developer Conference in San Francisco, where Peder had a surprising discovery about a popular game using Soundly. 

“‘Split Fiction’ is a game by the Swedish company Hazelight. It’s amazing. It’s got like 10 out of 10 reviews everywhere on Steam and it’s been super popular,” Peder shares. “Hazelight came by, and we realized they’ve been using Soundly for six years for some of the biggest titles. And I didn’t know this, so I’ve been playing their games not knowing that they’ve been using Soundly.”

Another surprising application came when Peder discovered the BBC horror podcast “Uncanny” was using Soundly. “I was listening to Uncanny, and emailed the sound designer, Charlie Brandon-King. I said, ‘God, I love the sound design on ‘Uncanny.’ And she replied, ‘Oh. So I’ve been using Soundly on this all the time.”

Peder has observed growing interest among YouTubers and other content creators who want to enhance their production quality. “We’re seeing more and more YouTubers doing videos about sound,” he notes. “Many YouTubers are doing videos on how to edit in Premiere. And they’re also making more sounds and reaching out to us about stuff.”

The Future of Sound

Rather than chasing trends or pivoting dramatically, Soundly focuses on steady improvement and integration with emerging creative tools.

“We’re always looking for what tools the creators are using. So we are just always making integrations wherever they are,” Peder explains. “We’re not trying to do any big turns or think we need to change everything. So we’re really happy with just doing what we do, working with what we love and like, slowly just becoming a part of the natural part of the creative workflow.”

Current developments include expanded integration with game engines and a new search capability. “A very welcome feature we will release, hopefully in the next month or something, is the ability to search for similar,” Peder reveals. “If you find the sound you like in your local files or wherever, you can click a button, and then it will find similar sounds in our library and in your own files.”

The team is also developing a collection of licensed versions of popular “meme sound effects” to help creators legally incorporate trending audio elements into their content. “Right now, meme sound effects are very popular, like ka-chings. So we’re trying to figure that out, do a pack, and get inspiration for everything people are using right now in shorts.”

Looking toward the future, Peder envisions Soundly becoming “the hub everyone goes to when they need sound. So we are working now with other sound and music providers, and looking into ways to get them into our platform. So we have one place where you can get everything you need, whoever you’re working with.”

Creator-Built From The Ground Up

Soundly team is deeply connected to its user base. As Peder explains, they aren’t just building for creators—they are creators.

“Everyone who works at Soundly is a creator working with sound or working with film. So even the developers are people working with sound or film,” Peder emphasizes. “Every feature we make and fix is based on our own needs, which helps create a polished sound library and an application that the creators will feel at home in when they open it up.”

The company culture reflects this creative spirit. In recent years, they’ve launched playful projects, including “a perfume a few years ago because we found some designers smell bad when they’ve been in the studio for a week” and “a Doors album on vinyl” featuring door sound effects.

The organic growth approach has built a loyal user base. “We have a very sticky user base that likes using Soundly. So we have a lot of fans in a way more than users, which is cool,” Peder says. “They talk to their friends, and they start using Soundly. So we don’t do any Google Ads or anything like that. It’s just like organic growth, and we try to make the best product possible.”

As Peder concludes, Soundly offers more than technical tools—it provides a foundation for creative expression built by people who truly understand their challenges and aspirations. Reflecting on the journey from personal project to industry-standard tool, he emphasizes the value of authentic growth: “No trickery or cheating. That’s the best kind of growth if you ask me.”