Speaker 1: I'm not here to sell you anything today, and I'm not going to tell you just to Google it. These are the five best places to get free sound effects online. Hey, I'm Ryan, and I'm an audio engineer who works in post-production. I've worked as a sound designer and a sound effects editor, and today we are talking about sourcing your own sound effects and building up your sound effects library. Getting good sounds really is half the battle when you're doing sound design, and so hopefully this is going to help you out, get you started on the right foot as you try and improve your videos. If you've Googled around for sound effects, you've come across sites that maybe have a limit on how many sound effects you can download per day, or maybe they require you to put their website in your credits. Maybe they're free for personal use but not for commercial. There's a whole bunch of limitations you'll come across. So these are five sites where you can get sounds for free that you can use in your own work, you can use in commercial work, it can be broadcast, whatever you want. You don't have to give credits. So these are the best I've found for that. As we get into it, the first three are places where you can go and just search up one sound that you're after, and the last couple are places where you can download whole libraries, like the Google Play Store, the Google Play Store, the Google Play Store, the Google Play Store, for free. The last one in particular has probably been the biggest contributor to me building my own sound effects library, so you definitely want to stick around for that. The first is freesound.org, and if you've done some Google searching for sound effects before, you've quite possibly come across freesound. This site lets different people upload their own sound effects and share them with whoever wants to download them. So this does mean that the quality can be hit or miss, but it also means that there's quite a broad range of sounds on there. So if I'm going looking for one sound in particular, this tends to be the first site that I look at. You may spend a little longer on the site looking through different sounds because the quality can be a bit hit or miss, but I do find that generally I get the sound that I'm looking for in the end. You do need to be a little bit careful with the site as well because some people ask you to give them attribution, so put them in your credits, but you just need to check that it's listed as either CC0 or Creative Commons 0. That means you can use it for free without giving any credit. I only use sounds listed that way. That way I can just keep them in my library and use them on any project I want and never worry about giving credits. The second one is pretty similar, and that is soundbible.com. Again, you just want to check that you're getting the right credit, but I've found most sounds on this site are fine. Hey, Editor Ryan here. I just had a quick look at Soundbible, and it looks like they've changed all of their sound effects to require attribution. That's a bit annoying. Sorry about the bad info. If you're okay with attribution, I guess it's still an option, but sorry about that. However, I think the sound's a little more general as well, and when I've gone in for a very specific kind of niche sound, I've struggled to find it on here. But having said that, it's a really great resource with good quality sounds, and you'll be able to get some sounds you need from here. The last of these places I go just to find one-off sound effects is the YouTube Audio Library. Now, a lot of people already know about this, because there's royalty-free music in there, but what you might not know is that there's a whole sound effects library as well. I've found this to be of a pretty consistently high audio quality, but it's quite a small library. There's only about 800 sounds in here, so there's a lot of stuff you're not going to be able to find, but if you're looking for something and it's in here, it can be of quite good quality, so it's definitely worth checking out. One other quick note is that you might think this is only for using on YouTube, but actually you can use these sound effects in other places as well. And even if you're not a YouTuber, all you have to do is technically create a channel, although you never have to post a video or get a subscriber or anything like that. You just click the button to create a channel, and then you can go into the YouTube Studio and you can access these there from the Audio Library. So go in and have a look if you haven't already. Now, with all three of these sites, my process generally when I need a new sound effect is that I go in, search for it, find the one I want, and use it in my project, but then I store it in my offline sound effects library, which I just keep on an external drive. This means that over the years I've built up quite a lot of sound effects in there, and I often find myself going back to ones I've used before. Maybe it's the particular sound of a river, and I know I used it previously and it worked really well, so I can just go straight back to that file. So I definitely recommend, if you're not already, that once you've used a sound effect, you find somewhere to store it so you can keep building up that library. Having reliable sounds you can keep going back to is going to make your process faster and faster as time goes on. Now, before we talk about the last two libraries, I just wanted to mention quickly as well that one of the other things I've really liked is creating my own sound effects. This might feel kind of daunting, but it really isn't. You can probably start with your iPhone if you want to, but if you can get yourself a portable recorder of some kind, that's going to be a great start. I'm using just a Tascam DR-05, which is a pretty cheap handheld recorder, one of the cheapest ones you can get, but it has decent quality stereo mics, and so I can go out and record sound effects with this. Now, I can record very particular sounds for my videos. What I like to do is just go and record general ambiences as well. So maybe I'm at a cafe, I'll just chuck it up on the table next to me, or get some kind of suburban night sounds here in Auckland. It just lets me get very specific sounds that are unique to me and I know that no one else has in their library. Over time, you can build up some stuff that you know is of a good quality and you know works in your projects and start to really craft your own sound by creating your own sound effects. So do that. Definitely give it a try if you have access to a recorder. Now, these last two sites are in a different category altogether, and what they do is they let you download entire libraries of sound effects. So if you're after one particular sound, this is not where you're going to go, but if you just want to start building out your library so you have some great sounds to go to, this really is a great place to start out. The first of these is 99sounds.org. Now, I'd heard about 99sounds, but I hadn't used them for anything until quite recently, but I just went on and checked it out a little while back and it's really awesome stuff. Now, some of this stuff is musical, so there's instrument samples and stuff, which might not be relevant to what you're doing, but they have a whole bunch of sound effects as well. I'd been looking for some good underwater sounds and there's a whole library of underwater effects, so I just grabbed that and now I have access to underwater sounds whenever I need them. There's also some libraries of cinematic hits and rises and impacts and all those kinds of things. So if you're doing projects with quite a lot of tension or maybe you're making trailers for projects, these are really going to help out. Now, with one of these libraries, you might get 20 sounds or you might get 100 sounds. There's going to be quite a variety in each of the libraries, but you just want to start downloading a few of these that you think might be relevant to you and putting them in your sound effects drive. This is going to really quickly start building up your library and all of these are of a great quality. It's not like Freesound where you're going to get some really poor quality recordings. These are all kept to quite a high standard, so definitely check it out. Now, if this has been helpful to you so far, it'd be great if you'd hit the like button. It really does help my videos out here. The last thing I want to talk about are a whole bunch of audio libraries that are released for the Game Developers Conference or GDC each year. Now, Sonus, partnering with different sound effects creators, have been releasing a library of sounds at each GDC since 2015. So at the moment, there are six years worth of sound effects that you can go in and grab. Basically, they'll work with someone who creates sound effects who might be selling thousands of sounds and give you 100 of their sounds as kind of a sampling of what they do. But again, they're totally free. You can use them on commercial work, whatever you want, and they're super high quality. When I heard it was for game design as well, I thought it might have been all really specific stuff, like a lot of guns or futuristic sounds or things that were quite niche. But actually, there's a whole bunch of broad stuff that's good for any kind of general use. So what I've done and I recommend you do as well is just go to the site gameaudio.gdc. And by the way, all the links I've been talking about are in the description, so you don't have to type in all the URLs. But go to that site and just download all six libraries. There's around about 170 gigs of sounds in there, roughly 7000 different sound effects. They're all really high quality. I'll give you a demo of a few different sounds now. And again, with all five of the libraries I've talked about, you can be using this in professional paid work. This is not just for home movies or anything else. So those 170 gigs make up a pretty big portion of my sound effects library. And if you don't have a sound effects library at all yet, this is going to be a huge kickstart to get you started with a great quality library. Once you've got some sound effects, though, you're going to want to work out how to use them well. So I've actually got a tutorial which you can click on the screen now, which will teach you how to layer sounds together to create more immersive scenes. Thanks for watching, though. Subscribe if this has been helpful, and I'll see you in the next video. Subscribe if this is something that you're into, and I look forward to seeing you in the next video.