Krotos Studio is a free, stand alone application that gives you access to some really cool, configurable sound effects, and virtual foley stage. The free version comes with configurable ambient sounds including City, Forest, Starship, and Suburbs. Also is included Boot Footsteps on a variety of surfaces, as well as Basic Cloth movement sounds, and my favorite, Whoosh effects including Hybrid, Electrical, Fire, and Airy.

All of these are generated and are unique and can change as you record them through the interface controls. Footsteps can be synced to action by clicking the mouse with each step, and cloth sounds can follow the action in real-time. If you upgrade to Genesis for $29, a bunch more sounds are added including cool cinematic trailer types of sounds, other types of footsteps, foley sounds, and other sound design goodness. Additional sound packs will be added later, allowing you to expand your library.

For someone who has spent way too much time scouring sound effects libraries to find anything even remotely close to what I have been looking for, and often having to record my own sounds and heavily process them, just to get the right sounding whoosh I was looking for, this is a godsend. I shot a quick demo at NAB where Matt Collings puts together some great sound design for a scene in just a few minutes, which shows how great this product really is. Watch the video below.

I was so excited about this that one of the first things I did when I got back from NAB was install it, and my son and I played with it, creating epic trailer lead in sounds, and finding just the right whoosh sounds. This was the very last booth I ran across before the NAB show floor closed, and I had no idea it was going to be one of the highlights of my trip. I will definitely be doing a review on this, so keep an eye out for that in the near future.