Libraries VS Recordings - the Never-ending Sound Design Debate

After my last post, I was giving a bit more thought to library sounds versus original recordings.  Conventional wisdom in the sound design industry is 'if you have the time and facilities, always record your own first'.  It's a good adage, and proves true 90% of the time.  But it also feels like a bit of a beat up of library sounds sometimes.

For the most part, sounds are put into and sold in libraries because they are great recordings, and often also because they are recordings that would be difficult for a lot of designers to collect on their own (exotic animals, gunshots, fire, ice, large impacts, etc etc).  Yet collectively, sound designers tend to look down their noses at them.

I've used library sounds a lot - more than I probably should have, in fact, since time is nearly always an issue.  Even for basic foley I could easily record myself, the temptation to grab a sound from the library and modify it to fit the intended purposes is strong.  But considering hardly any sound designers plonk a sound into a multi-track without editing it first, why is it such a problem?

Perhaps the source of the issue is that sound designers as a block wind up drawing from the same libraries too often.  Series 6000 is an amazing sound collection - which is maybe why it's been so overused that now its sounds are stale. The same way X-Ray Dogs' snippets of music have been so terribly misused by so many TV stations, movie trailer editors, and advertisement agencies.  Beautiful music - but less so when the new Narnia movie is using the same track as a discount travel agent advertisement.

Libraries are expensive, and not always as useful as you think (Wild World of Animals comes to mind, where a good portion of recordings are only useable for ambience due to the constant presence of interfering wind, background birdlife, or insects).  I've been seeing a lot more specialised sound libraries pop up lately, though, which I think is a great step to curtailing this problem.  The increasing accessibility of the necessary software and hardware, not to mention the new ease of distribution thanks to the internet, is providing more choice in the sound library market.  This is going to be a great boon for the designers without the facilities or time to build their up their own stock of custom recordings.  

Recording your own sounds will always be a source of pride for sound designers, but we should be careful not to let it become a form of snobbery.