How to find free sounds and sound effects

Posted on May 3, 2008 at 5:25 am

Looking for a cool sound effect for your video editing project? With simple to use video editing programs like Windows Movie Make and iMovie, just about everyone knows how to create short movie from video clips. I have well over 100 videos taken from my digital camera and using Windows Movie Maker, I can create titles, add sound tracks, put in transitions, overlays, and lots more!

However, sometimes you need to “jazz” up your video a little bit with some extra audio. Adding MP3 music files is one way to go, but that’s usually if you want a long background track. If you are looking for a sound to match some type of action in the video, you’ll need to look for free sounds effects online.

Luckily, there are a couple of sites out there that crawl and index sounds files for you from the web. You can then search for the files and filter by format, quality, file size, etc.

My favorite site for finding free sound effects and loops online is SoundSnap. What I like SoundSnap is that they break it down into categories, so you can find the sounds you are looking for quickly.

They have animal sounds, music loops (can be continuously repeated without an abrupt break), nature sounds, and tons more. You can then preview the sound effects online and if you like it, download it in MP3 or WAV format.

You can also upload your own sounds and add it to the database if you have some on your computer.

FindSounds is a free site where you can search the Internet for sound effects and musical instrument samples. The search engine is probably the largest collection of sound effects you will be able to find, all of which can be previewed and downloaded easily.

FindSounds also has a lot more filters when performing a search, so you can really get granular in your criteria. For example, you can search on file format (AIFF, WAV, MP3, or AU), number of channels (Mono or Stero), minimum resolution, minimum sample rate, and maximum file size.

After you perform a search, you’ll get a listing of all the sounds that matched your phrase, i.e. “Car Crash”, along with all the details about the sound:

To download the sound, just right-click on the link and choose “Save Target As” or “Save Link As”. You can also click on the second button (blue one) and that will find sounds that are similar to that particular sound! Very useful for finding related sounds that may have no come up during searching.

That’s it! Of course, everything you download from here is legal, since it’s not music or copyright protected. These sounds are great for not only add effects to your videos, but also for custom Windows sounds themes and phone ring tones! Enjoy!

Technorati Tags: find sounds, find sound effects, find sound effects and loops, free sound effects, online sound effects

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11 Responses to “How to find free sounds and sound effects”

alexis said on : May 3rd, 2008 at 7:57 am

thanks

Madhur Kapoor said on : May 3rd, 2008 at 1:48 pm

This is great. I can find some cool sound to include in my presentation

akishore said on : May 3rd, 2008 at 3:23 pm

Yeah, I forgot to mention that….free sounds for presentations also!

Haris said on : May 4th, 2008 at 1:42 am

Very helpful indeed. Thanks for sharing

Raj said on : May 4th, 2008 at 10:33 am

Nice Post. Thanks

akishore said on : May 4th, 2008 at 1:26 pm

Haris, Raj, no problem. If you guys know of any other sites for free sound effects, do post a link! Thanks.

Rod's said on : June 11th, 2008 at 12:52 pm

There are others sound libraries like en.kay-soundcollection.com which provides royalty free sounds, Foleys, ambiences, background sounds, special sound effects… in free download access. The creator of this website gives you some advices if you contact him by mail… interesting!

Ivan said on : June 21st, 2008 at 7:10 am

I normally use Soungle.com, hope it helps

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