Grass Valley, California, January 6, 2003—Comparisonics Corporation is pleased to announce FindSounds Palette, which is an audio player, recorder, editor, database, search engine, and Web browser, all in one software program. It is easy to use and well suited for anyone needing to search for, organize, and edit sound effects and musical instrument samples, including multimedia and Web developers, electronic musicians, sound designers, filmmakers, videographers, teachers, and students.

FindSounds Palette provides access to more than 1,000,000 sound effects and musical instrument samples on the Web and gives users the ability to organize and search audio files stored on their hard drive. Sounds can be searched using any combination of their attributes including file name, description, category, genre, source, copyright, format, file size, number of channels, resolution, sample rate, duration, key, and tempo. In addition, for any example sound, a Comparisonics "sounds-like" search can automatically find similar sounds on the Web or on the user's hard drive.

FindSounds Palette utilizes the Comparisonics colored waveform display to represent the sounds retrieved by a search, and this display helps users to "see" the sounds they are editing. Similar sounds are represented by similar colors, and changes in sound are indicated by changes in color. See the attached representation of the sounds made by a cat (orange), a fly (lavender), and a rooster (red). More examples can be seen at http://www.comparisonics.com/gallery.html.

Hollywood sound designers know well that useful and interesting sounds can be obtained by changing the playback speed of an audio recording. FindSounds Palette makes it easy to change speed and is the first sound-retrieval system able to search the sounds of multiple speeds. By searching each audio file at 25 different speeds, a collection of 10,000 audio files becomes a searchable database of 250,000 sounds!

FindSounds Palette is available for Microsoft Windows XP, 2000, Me, 98, 95, and NT. More information about the product, including a free 15-day trial, can be obtained at http://www.findsounds.com/palette.html.

Comparisonics Corporation (http://www.comparisonics.com) is the world leader in sound-retrieval technology. FindSounds.com (http://www.findsounds.com) is the company's Web search engine for sound effects and musical instrument samples. This award-winning search engine is like Google and AltaVista, but with a focus on sounds. Each month it processes more than 1,000,000 sound searches for more than 100,000 unique visitors.

CONTACT:
Stephen V. Rice, Ph.D. (srice@comparisonics.com)
Comparisonics Corporation, P.O. Box 1960, Grass Valley, CA 95945 USA
(530) 274-4440