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If you are looking for totally free sound effects, you may be in the right place. If you are looking for free sound effects of explosions, laser weapons, and alarms you have definitely come to the right place!

My library of sound effects currently contains 96 free effects (25 alarm effects, 35 explosions, and 36 laser effects.) You can preview and download all the effects as WAV files (16bit 44.1KHz Stereo), Vorbis OGG files (encoded at the bitrates 128kbps and 64kbps), and MP3 files (encoded at VBR 190kbps.)

To make browsing easier you can click on this link to browse the sound effect library with only the free ones visible =)

Following three months of development the new Imphenzia music site has been launched to start off the new year. This time it was a total re-make from the ground up of the music site and I had to learn how to develop using JQuery in order to get the visual effects, real-time updating of pages without page reloads (using “AJAX”), and at the same time keeping the development effort to realistic proportions.
During the development process I set two requirements upon myself to fulfill, 1) make the new site clean, and 2) make it very simple to use. By using JQuery and quite modern features of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) I realize that there are visitors that will experience problems with the design and functionality, namely the visitors that use old browsers or have disabled javascript. For the first time, however, I felt that it is a sacrifice for the greater good as the vast majority of visitors will benefit from a much improved experience.

I also had time to reflect on the historic designs and trends that my site has endured over the past 13 years. In recent time, for the launch of the 2008 site, it was all about content, content, content, account features, google ads, and more content. Following the trend at the time the font was small to fit in as much text and information as possible and the layout was split into three columns complicating it even further. The 2011 site is the complete opposite with much less information presented in a tidy manner with larger text and without columns. I also think that the time of content packed sites was a natural way to progress as it was expected to make use of fancy layouts and high screen resolutions, where as we’re now back to putting the visitor at the center of attention making sure that the message you want to get across is clearly visible and simple to understand.

For some time I have been contemplating over how I should release my music. In the very beginning it was only possible to purchase physical albums, then the addition of mp3 albums, then single mp3 tracks, then a “donation” to download all tracks for a period of six months. I found the various options, and how they were presented on my site, to be very confusing. What would my visitors think if I thought it was confusing? The idea of a donation, for example, would only make sense if all tracks were downloadable to begin with since a donation is giving without the expectation of receiving anything in return. Bottom line; it was very confusing.

I hope that the new site has taken a big step in the right direction to combat the issues outlined above. The album section has been totally redesigned with a clean look and a visitor can add digital albums and CD albums into a shopping cart. The donation feature has been replaced with a new feature for full access that still focuses on allowing the visitor to contribute with an amount of his or her choice and is return rewarded with longer term of access depending on the size of the contribution.

Just a quick line or two before I have to run. I've published a few full length videos on YouTube now. You can watch them here!

Example:

I have registered a new account at YouTube and THIS is the new Imphenzia Music Secion. I am creating 30-second previews of most of my tracks and using the "video response" feature to other popular trance videos. By creating two "channels" at YouTube, I release full length videos and these preview clips and I plan to keep adding to these channels whenever time allows me to. I use "Animoto" to create what could be classed as something between a video and a slide show and I'm quite impressed by their engine to quickly produce quite cool clips.

This is also part of my promotional drive to get Imphenzia more established in the trance world.

Another sleepless night resulted in a new track called "Evolution". It's a very upbeat trance track with a very happy melody and I found the mood quite appropriate now with it being Christmas and all :) As you may have read on the main page it's a free track so the mp3-file (in very high quality) can be downloaded.

My next focus will be to try and get my music launched on Spotify.com. I have already contacted them but they are not quite ready for indie-artists yet but will hopefully launch an upload platform next year some time. I think that Spotify finally delivers a good platform that is perfect for both artists and listeners. Not only is the songs extremely accessible for fans and listeners, but the artists receive compensation from the adverts on free accounts and from the paying members. It's like radio on demand basically :)

Continued remixing the track now and progress is quite slow still due to these tempo issues. The duration is now about 2 minutes and at the end fading out with the original SID will the ideas is to introduce tempo change into a more trancey beat...  We'll see how things progress :)

Listen to progress so far: Laxity - Alias [Imphenzia C64 Remix]

I can definitely tell I'm back in 'real life work now' as I only find 30 minutes here and 45 minutes there to remix. Just when I get into it it's time to quit. It's 2:15 am now and I have to get up at 7:am... hmm, signing out!