The Best Place To Find Great Sound Samples - Royalty-Free & Creative Commons | Freesound.org

Music producers often spend a lot of time looking for good sources of sound material to use in their projects. Over the years, all sorts of strategies have been pursued in order to find the perfect sample - and not without difficulties.

Sure you could go ahead and sample parts of your favorite movie, hoping to catch that particular sound effect you are after, all by itself and without any background noise... However, soundtracks seldomly provide this opportunity, as music, dialogue and other sound effects are tightly packed in, on a single audio track.

Seeing how much power and funds the entertainment industry has (including great connections and an army of overpaid lawyers), you want to be very careful not to get caught for plagiarism, which might hurt your career more in the long run than it helps you out.

So where can I go to get that seagull screech? Or the sound of kids playing outside without a care? Or dogs barking at a street corner? Or a landing airplane?

Fortunately, music lovers and producers have thought of a solution for this dilemma years ago, and the solution is awesome!

Feels... uhm, sounds like home

While it may not seem that revolutionary in 2018 anymore, the concept of a free online platform where people like you and me can upload their own recordings, tag them and get feedback from the community has been mindblowing at the time. The platform started in 2005 and has grown immensely since then, though never losing sight of what made it great in the first place.

Gone are the days that we have to hunt after whole sample pack libraries just to hopefully get that one sound out of it. As music producers, we are no longer at the whim of "professional studios" providing high quality sound material for us.

Sound libraries have been democratized. And god, does it work well!

After all these years, freesound.org is still going strong with its ever evolving library of the most unlikely sound samples you could hope for, recorded by a wide range of people from all over the Earth. Naturally the library also includes many if not all of the timeless classics - ocean waves, bird sounds, crickets, dish washers, car horns, door bells. Anything you can think of.

You will quickly find that suddenly, your *imagination has become the limit to what you can use for your songs, not any arbitrary lack of source material that limits your potential before you even get started.

Why I recommend it

So what are some of freesound's features that still make me come back for more after all these years?

• A creative-commons platform for top notch sound content - without all the old copyright hassles. Communication and trust persevere here!

• High quality samples are the standard. Most often they come as WAV files, but FLAC, AIF, AIFF, M4A, OGG and even MP3 are also supported. The format and quality is entirely dependent on the uploaded source material and generally really good!

• You can preview the samples conveniently from the list of search results with instant playback, open new tabs for the ones you are interested in and then download, comment and rate after you have created a free account. This will save you so much time finding the right sample you are after, because previewing does not require an account, and commenting and rating should only be done by people who care enough to actually create an account. It's perfect.

• Easily search through tags, all search results can be sorted by various methods. If you want to save even more time you could sort the results by rating, as the community is actively casting their votes on the quality of samples - granting 1 to 5 stars. This makes finding a good sample REALLY easy and satisfying.

• Tags include all sorts of things, places, languages and environments. Once again your imagination is the limit here. You could try to look for "elephant" or you could simply go for the tag "Africa" and get inspired by the samples you might not have even thought of!

• Download pages often provide even more detail - specific location, time and date, as well as the method of recording.

• Connect to your favorite recording engineers and make them happy by sending them the link to your track that used their sample. You could even ask them directly if they could try to get you a specific sample next time they are out in the field. Some people love making music, others just love to get the perfect recording. What a great synergy!

• A friendly community is always the backbone of a good collaboration - be it online or offline. And many people on freesound greatly appreciate the open and grateful way of communication that is commonplace on the platform.
  
  
  

I have used freesound a lot in the last months, one of the prime examples of me using samples from the site would be my "space elevator ride" track that I created for the Steemit Beatbattle a few weeks back.

All elevator sounds you hear in the track (including the bending metal, the elevator doors, the crackling walls and the motor cable sounds) come from freesound, sourced from 4 different samples. It worked out really well, give it a listen if you haven't already <3

So in the sense of gratefulness for all that freesound.org has done for my musical creativity, I have been wanting to write about their platform and get as many producers as possible over there to participate, rate and enjoy the benefits of working with high quality creative commons material, provided by real people like you and me.

Why don't you browse www.freesound.org a bit and see if you come across anything that makes your creative process come to life again?

It's projects like this that give me great hope for the future of humanity, especially in times when everything else in society seems to fall apart.

Thank you eternally freesound, for all you have done for us!

And to you reading this:
Thanks for stopping by <3