As we step into 2025, we wanted to take the time and reflect on Strata’s journey so far. After Strata's first anniversary, we reached out to our subscribers with a survey to hear how Strata was working for them. We were not prepared for the extent of the enthusiasm and positive feedback, and thought we should share it. Thank you to everyone who responded to the survey. We are excited to share the highlights & show how your input is helping us shape the future of Strata.

Strata Feedback: Key Insights at a Glance

Here’s what we’ve learned from your feedback, summed up in TL;DR fashion! For a closer look at in-depth feedback, subscriber quotes, and stats, head to the next section, "Subscriber Insights: What You Said & What We’re Doing”.

What You Love About Strata

High Satisfaction: Subscribers rated Strata 8.13/10 for overall satisfaction - thank you, we are so humbled!

High-Quality Content: The variety and professional-grade design of all of Strata’s collections stood out.

Hands-On Creative Control: Subscribers praised having unprecedented access to the whole REAPER project, including all the necessary ingredients (clips, tracks, unrendered effects, and source files) to make a sound truly their own.

A Fantastic Learning Tool: Many subscribers highlighted how Strata has helped them grow as sound designers and improve their workflows.

What We’re Improving

Learning Resources: We’re constantly creating more videos, blogs, and streamlined documentation to make onboarding easier. Keep an eye on our Strata playlist on YouTube for all the latest.

Pricing Options: While Strata remains competitively priced, we continue to explore several payment options to meet your needs.

Enhanced Integrations: Ongoing updates have made using Strata with sound databases like Soundminder, Soundly, and Basehead possible. We’re looking to make Strata even more accessible by exploring new integrations & expanding usage possibilities in the future.

What’s Next

More Collections: We’re committed to growing Strata and releasing new collections every month (except in July and December, when our team takes a well-earned break).

More Tools: We’re continuously developing new scripts, as well as refining workflows and integrations based on your feedback. Don’t miss our recent blog, Accelerate Your Strata Workflows - Part 3.

 

Subscriber Insights: What You Said & What We’re Doing

We’re grateful to have heard how Strata has fit into your workflows, sparked your creativity, and even exceeded your expectations. At the same time, we want to take this opportunity to explore where we can do better. In this section, we’ll dive deeper into your feedback, question by question - highlighting your thoughts, sharing key insights & stats, and show how your input is sharing the future of Strata.

Question 1: How would you rate your overall satisfaction with Strata?

An encouraging start! Let's take a closer look at what that means.

Question 2: Could you please elaborate on the reasons for your satisfaction rating? Feel free to share any specific aspects of Strata that influenced your level of satisfaction.

The positive feedback from subscribers

• “It is an unparalleled and original sound library subscription. I think it's great to be able to learn top-notch sound design techniques and get a high-quality BOOM sound library.”
• “I love that it gives access to the whole Reaper project. Lots of times the sounds are too intense for my purposes but I'm able to mute certain parts and customize the sound the way I want it and that has been incredibly helpful!”
• “I’ve been treating Strata as a learning tool as I don’t personally work very often in-game audio. Going through the presets, processing chains, and layers has significantly improved my sound design workflows. Also bonus awarded points for including preset descriptions in Enrage on what the outcome of the preset was, very helpful.”
• “High-quality designs with flexibility in their use given that we have project files.”
• “Being able to look under the hood at so many diverse sounds has been a priceless learning experience.”
• “It's providing me with many useful and valuable templates for many categories of sounds. Educational as well.”

Feedback taken on board and how we have started to address it

• “There are resources to learn how to use the libraries but they are somewhat hidden.”

We are continuously creating more resources to help get you started. You can check out the Strata playlist on YouTube, which we update regularly with tutorials, guides, and collection overviews. We also continue to publish blogs exploring scripts developed to help accelerate your Strata workflows. You can read the latest one here.

In addition, the Audiokinetic Launcher is receiving ongoing updates to improve accessibility and functionality. It provides direct access to Strata documentation and each collection’s soundbook - what we consider the ultimate resources when learning Strata. The latest release (2024.1.0.4408) introduces quick access to documentation, and the ability to install Strata VST3 plugins directly via the Launcher.

• “It's a great resource and value. The only drawback is how the soundpacks are arranged in the Reaper projects - they can be pretty hard to parse.”

Strata is now integrated with popular sound effect databases like Basehead, Soundminer, and Soundly. This means you can drag & drop your Strata collection folder to any of these tools to unlock Strata’s wealth of metadata, and use the built-in Strata integration to open, from any Strata rendered file, their source REAPER project.

This functionality is also available in the REAPER Media Browser. Install the Strata_Open associated Strata project from selected audio file.lua from the AK repository (https://github.com/Audiokinetic/Reaper-Tools/raw/main/index.xml). Add a tool button to the Media Explorer to trigger the script to streamline this process.

Question 3: At the moment of subscribing to Strata, what was the thing you were worried about that could have prevented you from subscribing?

Prior to purchase, you mentioned your fears were the following:

• “That I won't find sounds for my use cases.”
• “I was worried that most sounds would revolve around gaming.”
• “I had already purchased several BOOM libraries and was thinking about it, concerned that it would be a duplicate library with Strata.”
• “I was just worried I wouldn't use it and then I'd have spent all that money for nothing.”
• “Mainly the marketing, it was not super clear as to what Strata was when I subscribed to it, now it is much more clear as to what I’m getting when I subscribe to Strata.”
• “Another subscription to maintain. Pricing - I'm hoping you might reward some of us very early subscribers as the initial 3 year completes.”
• “Will these sounds become the next overused library in the industry?”
• “The intro price was low, the roadmap was clear, so no big risk there. But as I've already bought all the Boom Library I needed for my projects, It was mostly for the Strata exclusive content (Footstep & Physics) that I subscribed. So maybe the quality would not be there.”
• “nothing”
• “Price increases, usage terms”
• “Price, Reaper Project complexity”
• “That my employer wouldn't pay for it.”

We hear your concerns! I address it below in categories.

The Content

We want Strata to be your go-to sound effects library for every creative project. Since launch, we have grown Strata to 47 collections (with over 171,000 files) and we intend to keep growing it to cover the growing diversity of sounds needed for all media, games, interactive media, linear and non-linear experiences alike. 

Strata is also game audio engine agnostic - It is not limited to use with Wwise. It’s also being used in linear productions. We are always open to feedback on which collections you would like to see and or improve; the concept of Strata is an evolving library that grows with you.

The Price

Audiokinetic’s philosophy has always been and will always be, fair pricing. We pay close attention to the marketplace and work with our partners to ensure Strata offers competitive pricing that reflects its values. While keeping prices fair, we remain committed to offering the highest quality and will not compromise to meet a price point.

The Value of Strata

There is a premium to Strata, and this is reflected in the flexibility it provides through the REAPER project files and plugins. However, the enhanced versatility - allowing for rapid customization and almost infinite variations of the rendered content, preserved in the REAPER projects as you save and iterate your customization - makes it difficult to directly compare Strata to existing libraries that offer none of this flexibility. 

Our users are pleased to say after a year of using Strata, they are no longer fearful of the price.

Matt Pirog (Audio Director at Velan Studios) when asked about the price of Strata, said: “It is even more expensive to not get it.”

What Sets Strata Apart From Other Libraries and How Do We Communicate This?

We continue to make more free Strata sample collections. We feel the best way to get a sense of the potential value of Strata is by trying it yourself (Get the free samples here). As of now, we have 3 available for you to download from the Audiokinetic Launcher. They are royalty-free in perpetuity and give you a taste of what Strata offers.

As Michael G Wagner (Professor and Department Head of Digital Media at the Antoinette Westphal College of Media Arts & Design), describes it, “Strata is so on brand. It’s like Wwise - you look at it and it’s not obvious, but you start to use it and you discover how powerful, useful, and flexible it is.”

Customization is the Cornerstone of Strata

A subscriber's fear was, “Will these sounds become the next overused library in the industry?”

This caught me by surprise. We had never considered this concern - or rather, Strata was conceived specifically as a solution to avoid it. As good as the sounds are in the rendered versions in the Strata collection downloads, we have designed the REAPER projects to facilitate customization. You are free to get creative and rapidly modify the sounds to meet your needs. The broad range of potential variation is inherent to the design of Strata, and as such, Strata sounds become yours - unique to you and your productions, as building blocks for redesign and reuse.

Take our Footstep collection, with 15 variations of a walk footstep for a surface. Within the source sound files for those variations, there are often over 40 variations, and this goes for each layer of a footstep sound. You can swap out the source sound with an unused variation, as you have approximately 25 sounds not used in the set of 15 variations. Since there are 4 layers per sound, that gives you a potential of 1500 walk footstep variations per surface that have not been rendered as variations, and that is before adjusting the balance of the layers or the processing. That is just the walk footstep of a single surface. Extrapolate that across 18 surfaces and the extensive other types of footstep sounds, like run, slide, jump variations, and the potential for custom variation is enormous. Taking that a step further, one could render each footstep in layers into random containers in a blend container and, at run time, create almost infinite subtle variations of footsteps, for every surface and character in your project.

With the power to customize the Strata sounds, overuse is a problem solved by Strata rather than a cause.

Question 4: What did you discover as a result of subscribing to Strata?

A selection of subscriber comments:

• “There are plenty of great sounds.”
• “I like the Reaper collaboration.”
• “The new collections cover more of the use cases that I have.”
• “I was able to learn how sound design should be done with Non-Designed materials and how plug-ins should be set up by opening and referencing samples.”
• “I was wrong and I use it quite a lot.”
• “It is great being able to see how sounds are set up by the pros and being able to edit the individual layers instead of being stuck with just the full sound is a game changer.”
• “The valuable educational resources Strata offers.”
• “How different studios organize reaper projects”
• “It was a great experience to know the various ways to synthesize sounds.”
• “The thing that drew me to Strata was the educational element of it all.”
• “Greater insights into other designers' flow and process.”
• “That the Region Matrix in Reaper is extremely good”
• “Improved my production efficiency to some extent.”
• “The idiosyncrasies behind the creation of sounds that were previously unknown to me.”
• “You need skills and knowledge to do good audio design”
• “The Human Movement collection was also a great one for my project.”
• “The assets were useful as non-multitrack content too.”
• “Sound Design strategies and techniques.”
• “Great SD”
• “Much more than I'd hoped for.”

94% of responses to this question were positive! As for the negative responses, we’ve already contacted the individuals for clarification. They were either misunderstandings of the question or of what Strata is, which we were able to resolve to their satisfaction.

Question 5: Could you please provide a star rating for the following functionalities? 

There’s plenty of 5-star ratings on the chart, which is great validation - thank you!

The lower score of the plugins, we had somewhat anticipated, as we all have our favorite plugins. Strata can’t use them all, but you can, and we encourage you to use them, customize the Subprojects and make them your own. 

To many, ENRAGE is new and has flown under the radar. We remain confident that it is a great plugin. It has become a go-to plugin for me as I learned how to do things I didn’t even think possible, exploring its use by different designers and discovering its flexibility and performance. It is gaining popularity in the audio design community because it is a tool designed by audio designers for audio design. 

The Wwise plugins are incredibly effective and efficient, but they do have room for improvement in the user interface. We are working on that, albeit with a low priority; too many great things to do and too little time! 

Question 6: What would be three other benefits of Strata?

There was a lot of commonality in the replies, it’s just as well we only asked for three, here is a hi-light list:

• “Variety of collections”
• “All-in-one-place solution.”
• “Having provided the library in REAPER format”
• “That you have partnered with Boom library”
• “Having selected a theme for each month's library that is tailored for use in games”
• “Getting a glimpse into how the pros set up their sounds.”
• “The use of subprojects makes navigating the libraries easier.”
• “Educational resources”
• “More sound libraries being added”
• “Faster workflow”
• “Database indexing”
• “Quality of sounds both source and rendered”
• “It's obvious, but the video game targeted content and the variations.”
• “Quick audio design iteration” 
• “High-quality sound effects library” 
• “Customizable audio effect presets”
• “Flexibility of rendered assets” 
• “Sessions already available for content”
• “The launcher”
• “Flexibility”
• “Variety”

Question 7: If you've had a chance to use Strata, please provide your level of agreement to the following statements:

These statements are the aspirational goals of Strata, and we wanted to gauge how close we are to achieving them after our first year. They are long-term goals, and since many of our subscribers are still new to using Strata, we expected some “Not Applicable” answers. The statement about increasing productivity can be hard to gauge when talking about audio design. Principally, our goal as far as productivity is concerned is maximizing creative design time. If we were to ask this question again, I would phrase it differently.

Question 8: Based on your experience with Strata, your specific needs and considering the benefits described for each new plan, which plan would you be most inclined to prefer when renewing your subscription?

From this data, it’s clear that the reduced price when subscribing for 3 years is preferred. As the Academic Subscription had only recently launched when the survey was conducted, it looks as if fewer subscribers who provided feedback had Academic subscriptions.

Q9: Please feel free to share any additional feedback about Strata business models.

Some selected comments and our response.

• “I love Strata. It has allowed me to focus more on the app. It has inspired a lot of ideas for future project improvements.”

We are gratified to hear that Strata inspires you, thank you!

• “Some sound designers tend to feel bad about using Strata. They say the Strata sound library is already a combination of sounds and cannot be modified. But they evaluate Strata without really knowing how to use it. Work harder to improve awareness. And more publicity will be needed on how to use it.”

We are working on multiple videos to help people better understand the value of Strata. What helps the most is your word of mouth about Strata. Our experience with Wwise has taught us that the best endorsement is a satisfied customer. Please tell your friends and colleagues in the audio design community about Strata.

• “While I am satisfied with the early adopter 3 year term, I'm hoping for some continued loyalty pricing for early adopters, or something to that effect.”

We are committed to keeping the pricing of Strata competitive and building our subscriber base.

• “I would like a buyout option.”

We are hoping to be able to offer this option in the future. We are investigating several payment options.

Question 10: How likely is it that you would recommend Strata to a friend or colleague?

How to interpret this NPS result? Above 0 is good, Above 20 is favorable; Above 50 is excellent; Above 80 is world-class.

We would have loved to get above 50 (our goal is 80+), but there is plenty of room to grow and improve Strata. Personally, I rarely score anything above an 8 on a 1-10 scale, which would categorize me as “passive” in NPS terms. And meeting expectations is 5+ for me. I am looking forward to the next survey. 

From what we understand from the feedback, a majority of the detractor scores were because Strata is not available in a preferred DAW. This is understandable and unfortunate. We don’t currently have a plan or the knowledge to create Strata for other DAWs at this time. If you have an idea of what an acceptable minimal viable version of Strata in your preferred DAW would look like - given the functional limitations - we would like to discuss it.

Thank you to all Strata subscribers, and a special thank you to those who replied to the survey for all of your feedback, which is super encouraging. The Strata team will be using it all to improve Strata for everyone.