My love of sampling began in the late 90s with the help of a pirated version of Cool Edit Pro, a Radioshack microphone, a television, and a stack of VHS movies. Over the years, I filled hard drives with random field recordings and drones I’d lifted from movies. I particularly remember spending a lot of time with Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the Alien Trilogy, and Predator. Looking back, I shudder to think of all the hours I spent doing this, especially now that there are so many sound archives floating around. To save you some legwork, I’m going to highlight five of my favorite sound databases.
Note: While everything on the first three databases listed below are either royalty free or released under Creative Commons licenses, I’ll leave it to your discretion to decide whether or not to use or appropriate anything from the Library of Congress or FindSounds.
Note: While everything on the first three databases listed below are either royalty free or released under Creative Commons licenses, I’ll leave it to your discretion to decide whether or not to use or appropriate anything from the Library of Congress or FindSounds.
Freesound is always my first stop. Browse audio snippets, samples, recordings, bleeps, screams and instrument samples all released under Creative Commons licenses. You never know what you’ll find, but when you are looking for something specific, you can use a customizable keyword search and narrow by type, samplerate, bitdepth and packs. On the rare occasion that you can’t find what you’re looking for, hit the freesound forum and throw down a request.
While you won’t find straight samples or sounds on Incompetech, you will find royalty-free music. I’ve found lots of useful tracks in the “silent film,” “soundtrack,” and “unclassifiable” categories. I also appreciate that every songs is tagged with the bpms. While everything on the site is free for you to share, remix and repurpose, you will have to attribute the original work to the author.
Royalty-Free Samples & Sound Recordings is a Sound Cloud group for people who are willing to share their own royalty free samples and field recordings to be used in others' music.
On the Library of Congress site, you’ll find The National Jukebox, a collection of historical sound recordings available to the public to stream free of charge. A word of caution: according to the disclaimer on the site, “all of these recordings are protected by state copyright laws in the United States.” Do with the disclaimer what you will.
Find Sounds is a search engine, but unlike Google, it only searches for audio files hosted by Web sites throughout the world. Are they truly free? According to the folks behind the site, “they do not offer advice on the fair use of these files.” And nor do I.