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Free Downloadable Sounds

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Here are links to a wide variety of free sound files. These collections include musical instrument samples. sound effects, sample libraries, and even a tutorial on making your own sounds. There are also links to collections of music that is free to download. Some of the sounds include sample banks that can be loaded int hardware or software synthesizers.

Free Music Samples and Loops

Free Guitar, Bass, and Drum Samples: 24 free Guitar, Bass, and Drum kit samples. Many of these are set up for Kontakt, but are still useful for any other sampling use.
Analog Synth Loops and Samples: 80 loops and samples created with the Bugbrand modular analog synth.
Free Trance Sample Pack: Collection of 370 samples for Trance music. The samples are sorted in the following categories: Kicks, Claps, Hihats, Crashes, Rides, Snares, Percussions, Basses, Synths, Effects.
293 Free Trance Samples: 293 free 24 bit wav samples. The samples are divided into the instrumental categories: Basslines, Drums, Explosions, Leads, Pads and Trance Piano. The Drums contain loops and single hits.
Real Music Media: Real Music Media has made their sample and loop libraries available for free download. One hitch, however, due to bandwidth issues only their snare drum sample library and their Taijiguy Mellotron sample library can currently be downloaded (as of 12/18/09) Once the bandwidth issues have been resolved, look for their drum loop libraries, classical guitar loop library, and Synthetic Voices library to be available.
Partners In Rhyme: A selection of Free Royalty Free music loops to download. Most loops are Rock/Pop oriented, but there is still some other styles.
Roland TR-808 Sample Pack: Surachai at Trash Audio offers a free package of Roland TR-808 electronic drum samples.
Sample Radar: Sample Radar offers over 10,000 free loops, hits and multisamples in 20 different categories. These include techno samples, atmospheric samples, classic synth samples, drum 'n' bass samples, and much more. A fantastic resource.
Roland TR-626 Sound Library: A sample library of all sounds made by the Roland TR-626 drum machine. Each sound has been sampled at the 15 different pitch levels that are available.
Vipzone Samples: If you sign up for their newsletter, Vipzone samples will send you 250 mb of sounds, loops, and acapella and vocal samples.
Crowlyy'z World: Crowley'z World offers a fair number of samples categorized as Tones, Percussion, Vocals, Loops, and Effects. The site appears to have a facility to preview samples, but previewing did not work for me.
SoundProz: Soundproz offers a selection of free, royalty free music samples in the following categories: Bass, Pads, Rhythmics, SFX, Strings Synths, and Vocals. Unfortunately, although many samples could be downloaded when I tried, all the samples were not available.
Sampletracks: SampleTracks offers access to a wide variety of musical samples and loops once you complete their free registration. Many of the loops are available in Rex2 format for use in Reason, Cubase, and other software.
Platinum Loops: Platinum Loops has a frees section with over 400 loops available in a wide variety of styles.
Club Kicks 2: Wave Alchemy offers this collection of 65 kick drum samples from the Jomox AIRBase 99 drum machine. These samples have been processed, compressed and harmonically enhanced with a Thermionic Culture Vulture valve distortion box. The samples are free, but you must register for a free account to get them.
The Loop Loft free sample pack: Enter in your email address and "The Loop Loft" will send you a link to download free samples from all of their drum loop releases. Files can be downloaded in wav, Rex2, and aiff formats.
The Loop Loft Free Loops: Here "The Loop Loft" provides downloads of 12 free hip hop drum loops.

Free Sound Effects

Blastwave FX Free Sound Effects Download Pack | Blastwave FX: 68 free sound effects from Blastwave Sound effects. Selections include: angry goat bleating, bursting fireballs, robot footsteps, a pixie dust fly-by, digital glitch, and low frequency tremors.
Blastwave FX Free Sound Effects Download Pack | Blastwave FX 2: A second pack of Free downloadable effects from Blastwave. This Pack contaibns 60 .wav effects including lasers, arrows, splashes, explosions, thuds, and even kitties. All sounds are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License (all sounds are free to use , share, and remix provided you credit Blastwave..
Audio Micro Free Sound Effects: Audio Micro offers over 2000 sound effects for free. These are grouped in various categories from Animal sound Effects to Exterior Sound Effects to Foley Sound Effects to Electronic Sound Effects and many more. A great selection.
Absolute Sound Effects Archive: Almost free 2000 sound effects in 30 categories.
99 Free Sound Effects From Hollywood Edge: One of the premiere Sound Effect Libraries offers 99 free sound effects. There is a wide variety of sounds, and they are all excellent. Click on the "Free Sound Effects Button", then you must register. One possible inconvenience is that each sound effect must be downloaded individually - you cannot get all 999 in a single downloadable package.
Small Mechanics: Small Mechanice from ToneScape is a free smaple pack containing 100 mechanical samples. 50 samples of switches and buttons from all sorts of appliances, tools and instruments, and 50 electrical motors from kitchen appliances, cameras and a wheelchair.
Partners In Rhyme Sound Effects: Partners In Rhyme offers this fairly large selection of sound effects. There is a wide variety of effects, however, most are quite short.
Absolute Sound Effects Archive: A large variety of categorized +sound effects. Categories include Aircraft Sound Effects (68), Animals Sound Effects (144), Background Sound Effects (22), Battle Sound Effects (47), Bell Sound Effects (7), Bird Sound Effects (44), Car Sound Effects (87), Cartoon Sound Effects (189), Comics Sound Effects (27) , Electronics Sound Effects (31), Emergency Sound Effects (32) , Farm Sound Effects (92), Horror Sound Effects (20), Household Sound Effects (61), Industry Sound Effects (6), Medical Sound Effects (25), Miscellaneous Sound Effects (340), Musical Sound Effects (118), Nature Sound Effects (36) , Nautical Sound Effects (55), Office Sound Effects (13), People Sound Effects (149), Quotes Sound Effects (9), Recreation Sound Effects (11), Science Fiction Sound Effects (75), Tool Sound Effects (7), Train Sound Effects (24), Truck Sound Effects (42), Vehicle Sound Effects (177), Water Sound Effects (20)
A1 Free Sound Effects: A1 Free Sound Effects offers hundreds of free sound effects grouped in categories. Categories include, Free Animal Sounds, Free Cartoon Sounds, Free Computer Sounds, Free Siren Sounds, Free Weapon Sounds, Free Weapon Sounds, and many others.
1Soundfx: 1Soundfx is a large commercial on-line royalty free sound effects library. Although they generally charge for their sounds, they do offer 5 free sounds per week if you sign up for a free account. You do not get to pick the sounds, however, over time, you can build up a fairly nice library.

Sound Samples

Free Loops: Free Sound Loops and more!
Minus Morph Free Pack: The free download is a subset of the entire Minus Morph package. It contains various loops, basslines, pads, and glitches for creating minimal loop based music.
SampleSwap: A large collection of many types of free sounds. Includes Drum loops, multi sampled instruments, single sampled instruments, ambience and noise loops, melodic samples, sound effects, spoken word, voices, and more.
Free Sounds from the OLPC Project: Over 10GB of free sounds from the One Laptop Per Child Project. Includes Loops, Grooves, Licks, Stings, Hits, Pads, Melodic Motives/Themes/Phrases, Sound-Effects, City and Country Soundscapes, and more . All sounds are free and offered under a CC-BY license.
Mini Space Rockers Sound Samples: Eric Archer provides free samples of sounds made with his own "Mini Space Rocker" Synth. These are analog synth percussion type sounds. As an added bonus, he has the schematics for the "Mini Space Rocker" Synth on the same page - you can build your own if you like.
Waveformless Free Sample Friday: Wave formless offers free sample packs every Friday. These vary from samples of analog synths, to synthesized percussion, to early analog recordings, to various distortions, to samples from guest artists. Lots of variety, lots of free samples.
SampleSwap: Sample swap is a 100% free AIFF/WAV collection containing 5.5 GB of sounds. It includes 2,198 techno, hiphop, trance, and drum 'n' bass drum loops / breakbeats, 1,254 drum hits, 77 drum kits, 2,198 sound FX, 1,207 instrument sounds, 1,200 vocal samples, 1,047 melodic parts, fruity loops and more.
Peculiar Percussion: 83 mb of samples of unusual sounds that can be used a spercussion instruments. Some of these sounds include a wooden door, a ventilation duct, a metal lid and others. Tehe sollection also includes 4 atmospheric pad instruments. These samples are provided as .wav files. Patches are included for the full version of Kontakt 2.2.4 / 3.5 / 4.

Free Sound Libraries

Haptic Audio: Haptic Audio distributes free sound libraries under a Creative Commons 'Sampling-Plus 1.0%u2032 license. They currently have three libraries available. The libraries are a mix of musical and effect type sounds. All sounds are sampled at 24 bit/44.1khz. The current libraries can be downloaded as wav files or for Kontakt or EXS.
Hiss And Roar: Hiss and Roar produces royalty free sound libraries. Although they generally charge for their libraries, they also make a subset of each library available for free download (name and email address are required to download). The free libraries contain fewer samples than the commercially available libraries. Hiss and Roar currently has 2 libraries available. "Vegetable Violence" is a collection of various vegetable crunches, hits, breaks, and stabs. "Swishes" is a collection of whips, ropes, cables, hoses, cords, rods, brooms and many other items being swept through the air. The free libraries can be downloaded from the bottom of the information page for each individual library.
Sounds from the Large Hadron collider: Here you can freely download the sounds of various High Energy Physical particles and experiments. The sounds are synthesized out of data from world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator. Each sound has an explanation of how it was created, and some sounds also have a download available of the original data that was used to create the sound. Sounds are available in mp3 and wav format. The sounds generally sound like synthy, electronic textures.

Free Sounds For Hardware and Software Samplers and Synths

Reason Refills Archive: A very large collection of Free Reason Refills from all over the Web.
Free Rocksichord Electronic Harpsichord samlples for Kontakt: Sonic Culture is offering a free Kontakt sample library of the RMI Rocksichord, an electronic harpsichord. This 350MB library contains all 12 voices and accents from the original instrument. The original Rocksichord has been used by many well known artists, including The Beatles, The Beach Boys, Genesis, Stereolab, Terry Riley, and Wilco.
Free Sound Libraries From Boulder Sounds: Boulder Sounds offers several collections of sounds. Most of these are for Kontakt, however there are some available for Apple Loops, Giga and some others.
Simple Sampling Free Reason Refill: The folks a SoundCells offer the free Reason Refill "Simple Sampling". This refill contains 25 Reason Combinator patches based on the Rhodes like Stylophone, a note by note sampled and looped Stylohonne, and a "single-sample-rhodes", a "single-sample-kalimba", a "single-sample-piano", and others. To receive this sample pack, you must first send an email (as instructed on the website), and you will then receive a link to download the Reason Refill.
Hollow Sun Navation Bass Station Samples: Hollow Sun offers this free download of 30 synth bass sounds sampled from the Novation Bass Station. The samples are offered in formats for the Alesis Fusion, Akai S5/6000, and for Kontakt 3.
Sir Sedric's BoomBapp Reason ReFill: 150 dirty, grimy drum samples for Reason. Perfect for hard hitting hip hop and rap tracks, but also useful for anything that needs powerful backbeats. Some very nice original sounds - listen to the demo for samples.
Free Omnisphere patches by Jordan Rudess: Jordan Rudess has created a selection of multi-patches for Spectrasonics Omnisphere software synth. The patches are available from Spectrasonics at the above link.
eSoundz freesoundz: eSoundz has a free section with downloads for Reason, Yamaha Motif, and Yamaha DTX. There are also several free sound construction kits available for Apple Loops, REX, and Wav files
Theodore Krueger Kantakt Samples: Theodore Krueger has made availabe some of his personal sample libraries for Kontakt. "Yamaha Pacifica" is a free electric Guitar Library for Kontakt 3 and above. "Yamaha Bass" is a noisy Yamaha electric bass sampled chromatically - for Kontakt 3 and above. He also provides Free French Horn samples for downloading (for Kantakt 2), Finally, there is a free Music Box sample library for Kontakt 2.
Free Reason Refill from Woolyss: In addition to their free Lo-Fi wav samples, Woolyss offers a free 18 Mb Reason Refill of over 200 drums and over 30 REX loops sampled from the MOS 6581 (SID sound chip of the Commodore 64 home computer. Drum loops range from 85 bpm to 168 bpm.
Free Chip Drums Reason Refill: Chip Drums is a free Reason Refill of sounds reminiscent of drum and percussion sounds from the Commodore 64 and the Atari 2600. The sounds include 5 Starter Redrums, 12 NN-XTs, 150 kicjks, 70 snares, 20 hi-hats, and 25 FX and percussion.In addition there are 2 Combi instruments included.
Toy and African Marimbas Samples for Kontakt 2+ / Apple EXS24: A free collection of Toy and African Marimbas. The African Marimbas have between 5 and 10 velocity switched samples per key.
Kurzweli PC3K8 downloads: Kurzweil has made available 2 collections of sounds for their PC3K synth/samplerf. The sounds are from the "Synthscapes" (complex digital waveforms) and "Take 6 Vocals" (vocal articulations) packages.
Free Korg SV-1 Soundpack: Korg has released this free soundpack of sounds for their SV1 (Stage Vintage Piano). The sounds include a dark tine piano, an acoustic piano with more sustain, and a variety of organ sounds. This soundpack also includes split sounds (including left hand basses).

Free Glitch, 8 bit and Lo-Fi Sound Samples

Woolyss: Wolyss has 3 free libraries of 8 bit style retro game sound samples. The sounds range from various beeps and blips to electronic music leads and electronic drum/percussion samples. Sounds are available in wav format.
Free Music Chip Sound Sample Sets: Sebastian Tomczak has created and made available several sample sets based on various computer and game console sound chips. The title link is to a sample set built on the sound chip used in the Radio Shack Game Blaster and early Sound Blaster cards. There are additional links on the page to free sample sets created from the Commodore 64 sound chip (SID 8580), Sega game sound chips, the Atari 2600 sound chip, and others. All samples are copyright free and license free.
Bronto Scorpio Free Glitches vol. 1: Bronto Scorpio has released a sample pack of 120 free digital glitch sounds. All sounds are 24 bit 44k wav files. This pack also includes aa simple Kontakt (3.5 or higher) instrument where the samples are mapped across the keyboard.

Vocal Samples and Loops

Vocal Downloads: Vocal Downloads provides over 60 samples both musical and non musical for free download.
Acapellas 4 U: Once reqistering, Acapellas 4 U offers a large collection of free acapella samples for download.
1,338 Free Female Vocal Samples: Many female vocal lines in 24bit wav format. Each sample is provided in soft, medium and hard versions. Also, Harmony parts are also included. The entire package is available royalty free- you can use these anyway you like - as long as you do not redistribute them. Check out the web site for samples.

Searches for Free Sounds

FindSounds - Search the Web for Sounds: FindSounds is a web search engine that searches the web for sound files. You tell it what sound you are looking for, and it will tell you what is out there. You can restrict your search by file type (wav, mp3, au, etc...), resolution (8 bit, 15 bit etc...), sample rate, and maximum file size.
RapidShare Vocal Sample Search: This siearch for free vocal sample Packs yields many links to free vocal sample collections.

Free Music

The Composers/Performers in this section have provided music for free download, and free use as long as they are credited.

Kevin Macleod: A fairly large collection of music in a variety of styles
Jimmy Gelhaar: Mostly faitly large scale electronic and synthesized orchestral music. Free registration is required to download.
Anthony Kozaar: Fairly long (8 -20 minutes) ambient music. This is licensed with a share alike Creative Commons License.
Dano Songs: Mostly Pop/Rock instrumental music in several styles including Pop Rock Band with Guitar, Piano and Organ, Acoustic Guitar,
Orchestra and Strings Become the Heavens, Game Music, Meditation and Relaxation Music, Techno / Electronic, World / Ethnic. Also, some songs with vocals and lyrics and chord charts.
Audionautix: 250+ pieces of music in a wide variety of styles available for free downloading. Mostly synth, guitar, or guitar with synth tracks.

Make Your Own Telephone Sounds For Free

A very good tutorial on making your own telephone sounds using a hardware or software synth.

Let me know if I can help!

Didn't find a sound you were looking for? Let me know - or just say HI!

Reply

Tolovaj Mar 8, 2012 @ 3:34 pm | delete

Hi, I am great fan of SoundSnap, but there are free sounds only for oldskool now. Maybe you can add 1soundfx, where you get 5 free sound effects every week (not by your choice, but in a year or two it adds to nice library). And there is more...