Krotos–a respected developer in the audio industry, has once again pushed the boundaries of sound design with its latest product, Krotos Studio Pro. Known for its innovative approach to audio tools, Krotos has redesigned its flagship product to empower sound designers, musicians, and audio professionals with a comprehensive suite of features that streamline the creative process. With Krotos Studio already a year old, Krotos has released a huge update, introducing Krotos Studio Pro. In this article, we dive deep into all the features of Krotos Studio and the brand-new features of Krotos Studio Pro. Plus we’ll provide some insights with an exclusive interview with the Krotos development team.
USER-FRIENDLY INTERFACE AND WORKFLOW
To bring you up to speed, Krotos Studio is available through a subscription-based model that allows users to search, perform, and quickly create sounds using unique tools to control and perform sound effects for your project. At the core of Krotos Studio is its remarkably user-friendly interface, designed to cater to both beginner and experienced sound designers. It all comes down to a 3-step system–pick a preset, perform your sound, then drag and drop your sound into your project. The intuitive layout ensures that all essential tools are easily accessible and notably reduces the learning curve to enhance productivity. Krotos Studio comes equipped with a wide range of sound categories such as ambience, footsteps, and foley sound effects. An interactive XY axis grid allows for control over the dynamics to suit your specific needs.
One of the standout features for me is its innovative approach to the traditional drag-and-drop concept. Unlike other software where finding the right sound and dropping it into your session can be cumbersome, Krotos Studio makes this process incredibly efficient. The drag-and-drop functionality, combined with a modular design, allows users to seamlessly customize their workspace to fit specific needs. This customization makes the creative process pretty satisfying by providing a level of flexibility often lacking in other tools. To add a cherry on top, Krotos Studio allows you to essentially draw in your sound effect and sync the duration of the sound to fit the context, essentially eliminating the tedious process of having to cut, trim, and blend your sound to fit the duration of your project.
Moreover, Krotos Studio takes a whole new approach by integrating advanced search and categorization features, which simplifies the process of locating the perfect sound. This is particularly beneficial for those who, like myself, need to work quickly and efficiently without sacrificing quality.
DYNAMIC SOUND LIBRARY
Another great standout feature of Krotos Studio is its dynamic sound library, which offers an extensive collection of high-quality sounds and samples. This library is continuously updated, ensuring that users like me always have access to the latest and most relevant sounds in the industry. I particularly enjoy the monthly sound preset updates, which keep things fresh and exciting. Discovering new sounds regularly helps fuel my creativity and ensures that my projects always have a unique edge.
As someone who has worked very closely with audio metadata, I find the tagging and categorization system in Krotos Studio to be exceptionally efficient. The intelligent search functionality makes it incredibly easy to find the perfect sound for any project. Unlike traditional royalty-free sites where filtering through keywords can lead to a frustrating rabbit hole, Krotos Studio’s search capabilities are rather impressive. Their search categorization is spot on, allowing me to quickly locate exactly what I need without wasting valuable time. This efficient system not only streamlines my workflow but also enhances the overall quality of my projects by ensuring that I can easily find the most suitable sounds.
ADVANCED MACHINE LEARNING & AI-ASSISTED CAPABILITIES
Okay, let’s take a moment to acknowledge the elephant in the industry, AI is a buzzword that sparks both enthusiasm and skepticism. Whether you’re for or against it, AI technology is undeniably advancing rapidly. However, Krotos Studio adopts a unique approach by using AI to enhance your workflow while ensuring you retain full creative control.
One of the most impressive aspects of Krotos Studio is its integration of advanced machine-learning technologies. The AI Foley engine, for instance, analyzes and arranges audio materials by frequency, timbre, and intensity, creating soundscapes that feel incredibly natural and organic. They sound amazingly lifelike, complementing the existing library with a new way to create nuanced sounds. Each preset includes small chunks of sound, mapped onto the X-Y pad with timbre on the X-axis and intensity on the Y-axis.
I believe the approach to AI taken by Krotos doesn’t overshadow the creative process, but rather, enhances it. The technology assists in making sound design more efficient and intuitive while ensuring that you remain in full control of your creative vision. This thoughtful integration of AI sets Krotos Studio apart from traditional AI generative software, making it an invaluable tool for sound designers looking to leverage cutting-edge technology without compromising their artistic integrity.
REAL-TIME PERFORMANCE AND CONTROL
One of the most enjoyable aspects of Krotos Studio is its support for real-time sound manipulation. This feature makes it ideal for live performances and quick sound design iterations. It is a fun and innovative approach to sound design that allows you to perform sounds in real-time, bypassing the tedious process of manually syncing and slicing sounds to fit into a project.
This real-time capability makes the process much more enjoyable when compared to the traditional method of searching through a sound library or royalty-free subscription. Instead of spending time auditioning sounds to see if they fit my vision, Krotos Studio allows me to control various sound parameters on the fly thanks to the responsiveness of the XY pad controls. This hands-on approach enables me to hear and shape the sound as I go, making the creative process more fluid and dynamic. It brings a new element of performance to your sound design, allowing for spontaneous creativity and experimentation.
REGULAR CONTENT UPDATES
Krotos Studio keeps things fresh with monthly updates that introduce new presets and features to expand your creative process, providing professional-quality sounds ranging from Foley to Sci-Fi effects. It’s incredibly satisfying to receive new presets each month, as they continuously expand the creative possibilities and keep me in tune with the latest trends in sound design.
Having access to a constantly evolving sound library means I always have the latest tools and sounds at my fingertips. This not only boosts my productivity but also keeps my work relevant and innovative. Each update feels like a little gift, filled with high-quality sounds that inspire new ideas and elevate my projects to the next level.
KROTOS STUDIO PRO
Krotos Studio is celebrating its one-year anniversary with a bang, unveiling its biggest update yet—Krotos Studio Pro. This new version includes everything users love about Krotos Studio, along with a suite of professional-grade tools that users have been eagerly anticipating.
Some of the most exciting new features include the ability to add your own sounds, create new presets, and even customize existing presets from the factory library. The introduction of the new edit window, which includes a core engine window, a performance area, and an assignment area, increases the possibilities for some unique sound design.
The Core Engine Window allows users to integrate advanced processing functionalities known as engines. This means you can now add granular synthesis, Reformer AI, or a sampler to your projects. Users can incorporate their own sound effects with full control and run up to 16 engines simultaneously.
Once you’re satisfied with your engine parameters, you can move to the Performance Window. This area looks and behaves similarly to the original performance window, but includes extensive new features and layouts designed to meet the diverse needs of users. The performance window is intuitive and allows you to scroll through various templates designed for different needs, adding an extra sense of creative control.
After adjusting your engines and performance window, the Assignment Area is where you assign your newly created sounds. This feature caters to specific workflows, with templates that include precise macros necessary to automate your sounds creatively. Once you’re happy with your settings, you can save your own presets or edit any existing preset with the same level of creative control.
EXAMPLES
AI Foley Gore
AI Foley Ice Pressure
AI Foley Keys
AI Gun Foley
Cinematic Eerie Scene
Cinematic Insect Hit
Foley Gun Handling
Vehicle Jetpack
Weapon 9mm Pistol
Weather Storm Exterior
INTERVIEW WITH KROTOS DEVELOPERS–MATTHEW COLLINGS AND ROB LOUGH
As someone who has closely followed the development of Krotos products, it was great to have the opportunity to speak with Matthew Collings and Rob Lough from Krotos who were kind enough to answer a few questions about the development and future plans for Krotos Studio.
Introduction & Vision
JO: Can you provide a brief overview of Krotos Studio and your role in the company?
MC: Krotos Studio is a single place to do any type of sound effect. It’s really performable, accessible, and lowers the barrier of entry to people wanting to do sound design, very high-quality sound effects for their projects, be that in games, film, TV, post-production, advertising or content, or anything else in between.
I’m Matthew Collings and I am the head of product development. I’ve been at the company almost since the beginning–about 10 years. My main role is to kind of figure out what we should or shouldn’t build, and why. Then communicate that through various tendrils to all the other people in the company.
RL: I’m Rob–the head of growth. I started in March and my main remit is to grow Krotos Studio within the sound design space and with sound professionals. My experience in the [content] creator economy means we’ve now got to diversify. When I joined [the team], we had like a 60/40 split, and now it’s 50/50 [regarding content creators and sound design pros]. And we’re growing around about 25 percent month to month, so it’s exciting and the feedback we’re getting from both segments of our users is pretty glowing, to be honest.
JO: What inspired the creation of Krotos Studio and what niche in the market are you aiming to fill?
MC: The mission of the company is to try and change the way people work with sound. We’ve always been really focused on sound design and it’s always been a fascination to us that this is a really hard thing to actually do. It is an art form in itself. There is an immense nuance to it, but we’ve always felt that there’s a gap in lowering that barrier of entry, making it faster, more accessible, more efficient, and more performative, with a musical approach. A tool that you can really perform–it’s a very expressive process rather than tedious editing–a the place to go if you want to do your sound design no matter what your level of experience.
Standout features
JO: For those who may not be familiar with Krotos products, what are the standout features of Krotos Studio that differentiate it from other sound design tools in the market?
MC: So I think one of the standout features is its combination of assets, tools, and accessibility all in one. It’s not a library and it’s not a plugin that processes audio, it’s all those things together. So right out of the box, if you need background ambience for a particular scenario, you can just load a preset, adjust it really quickly, and get a sound you like. You can do that for any type of use and sound effect.
One of the other really neat features is a really cool drag-and-drop performance workflow. So every time you interact with the plugin, it records the audio of what you’ve just done and you can just pick that up from the UI and drop it immediately into the timeline of your project. So you don’t have to stop, render, go find the file, drag it in, and all this type of stuff.
JO: Krotos Studio delivers professional quality sound design with a welcoming user interface for beginners. Was there a lot of thought in the design to ensure a user-friendly experience regardless of your skill level in sound design?
MC: We spent a huge amount of time on it and it’s all done very carefully. Very early in the project, we did a lot of prototyping in Max/MSP as we always do. So we were designing it before we built it with the user experience and accessibility being really important to us. Making it do the job of 10 or 20 different products while keeping the experience consistent and intuitive was probably the biggest problem. Otherwise, every time you load a different preset, it would be like having a different product in front of you. We wanted to avoid that cognitive dissonance of moving between different interfaces. We spent a great deal of time on that and I think we managed to make something that is not only really powerful but also very simple, which is extremely difficult in my experience.
Future Plans and Updates
JO: Do you have any exciting updates or features planned that users can be excited about?
RL: Krotos Studio Pro has been asked for by a lot of our pro users. Matt can talk about some of the new features. But it’s going to be a game changer for our pro users for sure and even some of our creative users, if they want to really upscale their sound design.
MC: The pro version offers a new level of detail over pretty much anything. So it’s the workflow that you currently have in Krotos Studio with simplified controls, plus having access to leverage both traditional and ultra-complex workflows. And you oscillate between the two in whatever way you want.
JO: The entertainment industry has been evolving and with the rise of AI audio generative technology, how is Krotos positioning itself to stay ahead of these trends?
MC: The other area in which we’re doing a lot of R and D is AI-related technology. Our take on that is always an assistive first technology. We’re not trying to, you know, take away sound designer jobs. We’re trying to make them more effective and more efficient. So we’ve got some really cool things coming down the pipeline later in the year that are more AI-based, but not in a way that’s terrifying. At least that’s the way I look at it.
I think the challenge with a lot of AI tools is customization after the fact. It’s great if you can put a prompt into something and it gives you something immediately, exactly what you want, but that doesn’t happen that often in my experience. It’s a great way to get you a certain distance of the way, but we want to get you the whole distance of the way.
So how do you achieve that? And how do you allow people to have enough customization as part of an AI-driven workflow? AI is just really the assistant in getting you where you want to go. Maybe a prompt into an AI system will make something really exciting for you. But then how do you get that to be exactly what you want? I think that’s really a challenge throughout all AI tools. I don’t think anybody has solved that so far, so I really want to dig into that problem a lot more.
RL: I think another thing from a business standpoint as you mentioned, Jonathan, is the noise. There is a lot of noise from perceived competitors and it is important for us to just stick to our mission and our vision of democratizing sound design–really running our own race and ensuring that we’re listening to our customers at all times. You know how it is, you go on LinkedIn, you can just see everyone’s building these new things and it can be terrifying. But I think as long as we’re providing value to our customers, we’re going in the right direction.
JO: Krotos Studio releases new presets every month designed by well-known sound designers. Are there any exciting collaborations we can expect in a future preset pack for Krotos?
No, none that I can talk about, but we would love to do a lot more like that and would really like to get the community a lot more involved in Krotos Studio preset design and Krotos Studio preset expansion. That’s a bit tricky now, but I think in the future there will be things we’ll be doing that will open that up and that’s really exciting! If anyone’s interested, let me know, and let’s talk!
JO: The subscription-based pricing model is frowned upon by some creators. Are there any plans to introduce perpetual licenses as an alternative option?
MC: So at the moment we do a monthly and annual subscription. I wouldn’t say perpetual is off the table, but one of the things that people have always commented on about Krotos products is that they’re really expensive. The great thing about our subscription model, particularly with a monthly option, is that it becomes accessible to anybody. I think one of the things that I hear a lot from users is that Krotos Studio is affordable and offers you an enormous amount for a monthly fee or even an annual fee of a couple of hundred bucks.
So the thing that I like about the subscription option is that people can come in and out of it. If they don’t like the product they don’t have to feel like they’ve wasted hundreds or thousands of dollars. I like that the software grows every month, which we can’t do with the other products. I do understand people’s anxiety about the lack of a perpetual option, but I think the trade-off is that it allows a lot more people access to what we’re doing and lowers the barrier of entry. That’s one of the things that we’re trying to do.
RL: That’s not the first time I’ve heard what you said there, Jonathan. I’m a big believer in SaaS (software as a service). As a user, it works so you can continue to build the greatest product for the user and as long as they update it, they’ve got the best version of that product at all times. Like Matt said, a very reasonable price. I also think it’s the way the world is going and I genuinely think it’s a good thing for both developer and user.
Exclusive updates
JO: Are there any exclusive updates you can share with Waveinformer readers who are active users of Krotos products?
MC: A lot more content for Krotos Studio. Lots of content in areas that we haven’t done before as the product or as a company as well and I think things that no one else has actually done. That sounds hyperbolic, but yeah, lots of cool, exciting new things within Krotos Studio, and as mentioned, a new version coming in the next couple of months that will be very exciting. Plus the more AI stuff as well!
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jonathan Ontiveros is a sound designer and content creator with roughly 10 years of experience in the entertainment industry. He worked as Lead Sound Designer for Audio Design Desk, a new innovative software that has earned multiple awards such as NAB’s Product of the Year, and has been credited on productions for popular streaming platforms such as Netflix and Hulu. His passion for audio originates from his background as a musician with over 15 years of experience playing guitar and performing at live events. He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Audio Production and has an insatiable thirst for new technology and a natural curiosity regarding sound in general.
