I signed up for the Persona free trial and was impressed with the quality of the music. In the end, I chose the AppSumo top tier option. I had struggled with search in the free trial (note one has to create a new account to apply the codes, the trial account is a throwaway, don't do too much curating there) and the top tier promised significantly better search tools.

I have good news – AI search is genuinely much better than the basic search. With the advanced search (top-tier only) one can get to good music which matches one's target track or description much more quickly than by browsing oneself.

More good news – the stems are incredibly useful. I don't care for many of the vocals, which give away the generic song writing. Both words and voices shout ordinary, banal, generic. If you strip the vocals off of some of these factory-made library songs, they don't sound much different than the originals. This is the instrumental stem. The orchestration and production are very good, miles above the Envato-level synthesized junk flogged to YouTubers.

Stems are also only available on the top tier.

Now for the most important part of the review…

SFX library. Everyone is interested in the sound effects library. Including me. Here's the report you all want to read.

What is it? The Persona SFX library appears to be built on SoundBits.de and the work of Saro Sahihi. Sahihi is a mid-tier sound designer whose work is fairly generic and well behind top names like the guys Mark Mangini (Dune) & Richard L. Anderson (Raiders of the Lost Ark) who produce a commercial collection called Odyssey. There's about 6000 files in twenty libraries. It's not nearly enough to cover all your advanced sound design needs, but it's something. You have the basics for YouTube videos, including lots of the trendy alarm and whoosh sounds which might not be in your sound editors default library.

A sound library of this calibre sells for about $500 on an individual license (though there may be some free or almost free ones which come close). The good news is that the library is housed in a SourceAudio framework which specialises in advanced search of music and SFX libraries, so the tools are good.

If Persona decides to double down on their SFX offering, they could easily go from 20000 sounds and 6000 files to over 500000 sounds and 200000 files. The benefit to those of us on the top tier would be not having to download and manage all those files ourselves. Wrapped in SourceAudio's web wrapper, we could lean on our online access. I'm serious about this. Asset management is a huge issue. If Persona were to offer us a top-tier SFX library with the existing asset management it's a huge workflow bonus.

Conclusion: if you don't have a good music library with permanent access and you have videos with limited music budgets, the Persona offer is great. I'd avoid the first two tiers (as affordable as they are) as the search is execrable and there are no stems. The SFX library is a nice add-on and could turn into a reason to buy the whole bundle if the Persona guys decide to make it so.

I wouldn't like to ever pay a monthly fee for better SFX, but I would certainly chip in another one-time fee for access to significant improvements to the SFX library, as I like the idea of having my SFX available in one place with great search.

Sustainable. I'm not sure about the long term economics here. I hope the Persona team have lifetime licenses for everything which is here and that creators cannot withdraw from the project and empty the library, if someone bigger comes along and offers an exclusive. The SFX library is also tricky as the Persona guys have to pay ongoing license costs unless they can buy the sound effects outright. They are also on deck for the monthly SourceAudio library management subscription which is $359/month at current size (the good news is that Persona could move from 6K files to 99K files with only doubling their monthly library cost. One tip might be to add quite a bit of open source sound effects, including improving the metadata, as the real key for sound effects outside of quality and variety, is just being able to find what you need quickly and easily.

I'd recommend that creators download the songs and stems which they like best and put them in folders, just in case the worst happens, along with their Persona receipt and a copy of the original license. If you do that, you can't lose.