Free your sound...

...and the rest will follow

Looking for a Bass Drum to spice up your dance track? Or searching for the sound of an aeroplane flying by? Or maybe you just want to let yourself be inspired by listening to what others recorded with their microphones and processed afterwards? All of this is now just a click away: Freesound is a huge online library of sounds which can be used free of charge. There's a total of nearly 3000 samples which you can access by registering and they're comfortably arranged into search categories such as "Field recording", "Motorcycle", "Drum", "Synth-Noise" or "Frequency Modulation". Everyone is invited to upload samples of their own in order to extend the database and since there is also a forum, you can talk to other sound sculptors and exchange ideas. If you're a composer and would like to use some of the sounds provided by Freesound, you can do so even for commerical purposes, as long as you mention the name of the sample's creator and abide to a simple set of rules. Another idea behind the project is for audio research institutions to find correctly licensed audio for the testing of some of their algorithms. It looks, once again, like "open source" could be a fruitful and even financially viable factor.

Homepage: Freesound