The most important tool in a sound designer's toolbelt is his/her sound effects explorer or browser.

It's the equivalent of a painter's brush and palette!

There are many options on the market... Soundminer, Soundly, SoundQ, etc...

I personally chose to work with SoundQ because it's free and quite frankly, I got used to working with it. I simply use it to connect my purchased sound effects libraries and my own personal ones as well.

It has the basic tools I need because I do my editing in Pro Tools anyways.

However, more advanced tools like Soundminer have lots of editing tools built into it. Might look into to it soon!

For now, here's a video where I demonstrate SoundQ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMaknEm_MEE

I also use Soundly from time to time for its handy AI voice synthesizer!

Which sound effects browsers/explorers are you using?