
Sound effects are used to emphasize artistic or other content of films, television shows, live performance, animation, video games, music, or other media. These trick of sound are mostly achieved by combining technology, ingenuity and creativity. Sound effects are important for digital media because an appropriate sound effect can easily resemble a real occurrence for a situation.
We understand it’s kind of fussy to record and process sound effects on one’s own. Thus, we’ve crawled into Internet and search for free sound effects which are available for download. Here’s 55 websites for free sound effects download. Full list after jump!
Note: Some of these sound effects have limited rights. That means they are not allowed for commercial usage. We urge that you check the rights before using them for business purposes.
More: You might also be interested in 25 Free Digital Audio Editors You Should Know
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Flash Kit
Flash Kit has an ever growing list of shareware and freeware SoundFX for download. It provides a powerful searching, excellent organisation and easy real time previews make this the most advanced Sound FX download site on the net! mp3 and flashtrak versions of all effects as well!
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Audio Micro
AudioMicro is a revolutionary collection of user-generated micro stock music, sound effects, production music, production elements and music cues. Finally, high quality audio content is available at unbelievable prices with no hidden costs or fees.
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Sound-Effect
Search for, preview and download royalty free sound effects for immediate use in your multimedia project. These high quality royalty free sound effects are hand-picked from only the best sound designers.
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SoundSnap
Soundsnap is the best platform to find and share free sound effects and loops- legally. It is a collection of original sounds made or recorded by its users, and not songs or sound FX found on commercial libraries or sample CD’s.
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FindSounds
FindSounds.com is a free site for finding sound effects and musical instrument samples on the Web. It is a Web search engine, like Google and AltaVista, but with a focus on sounds. It provides powerful features, yet is simple and easy to use, and suitable for all ages.
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Soungle
Soungle is a free site, developed by Southern Codes, for finding all kind of sound FX and musical instruments samples on our mega online library. As different from most of similar sites, Soungle is NOT a Web search engine. It only searches in our growing monster database. Our goals are to keep it simple to use (search, preview and download) and to keep it free.
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SFX Source
In SFX Source you’ll find cutting-edge and imaginative sound samples crafted with passionate expertise for use in all levels of production, from professional to amateur, for use in Film, TV, Games, and New Media.
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A1 Free Sound Effects
A1 Free Sound Effects wants to provide the internet with our Free Sound Effects that you can download to your computer and use for church, school, home or for any non-profit project. Commercial Sounds Available.
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Soundrangers
Soundrangers specializes in generating state-of-the-art royalty free sound effects and music for interactive media, such as virtual user-interfaces, games, online entertainment, web sites and communication devices.
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Partners In Rhyme
Partners In Rhyme provide free resources, help and advice to amateur and professional multimedia producers, film makers, musicians and students in their search for music, sound effects and audio tools to complete their projects inexpensively and quickly.
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Soundboard
Soundboard.com puts all your audio clips, as well as millions from other users in one, easy to manage location. Its mission is to invite everyone to help us create a central site for audio clips in a format that anyone with a connection and a browser can enjoy.
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FreeSound.org
The Freesound Project aims to create a huge collaborative database of audio snippets, samples, recordings, bleeps, … released under the Creative Commons Sampling Plus License. The Freesound Project provides new and interesting ways of accessing these samples, allowing users to browse the sounds in new ways using keywords, a “sounds-like” type of browsing and download sounds to and from the database, under the same creative commons license.
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Acoustica
Acoustica has a great database and will help you find that ever so elusive sound effect!
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Ljudo
Ljudo gives free access to more than 1200 sound effects. The sounds are available in two formats: RealAudio and Mp3. Audition with RealAudioplayer or download as an MP3. Ljudo includes multilingual access, which translates the word you are searching for from your language into English.
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Nature Sounds
Nature Sounds.ca includes free online samples and as well as full-length (usually CD-length or longer!) downloads of quality nature sound mp3s. Some are mixed and edited field recordings, others are free of intervention.
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Pac DV
PacDV allows you to use the sound effects on their web site free of charge in your video, film, audio and multimedia productions.
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Alc Ljudprod
Alc Ljudprod have assembled their sound effects in MP3 format and they are free to download and use.
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Hollywood Edge
The Hollywood Edge is the leading Hollywood Sound Effects Library. These are the Sound Efx used in the big award winning Hollywood movies. From explosions to a pin drop.
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Download Sound Effects
Free Sound Effects to download will send your great specials for Sound-Effects products after you sign up their free newsletter. Also they will keep you updated with the best new SoundFX products from all over the world.
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SNDBRD
A very simple page which displays all the downloadable sound effects on its main page with a well-arranged list.
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Brandens
Many people make a living as Foley Artists adding sound f/x to movies and the like. Brandens has a large collection of sound f/x here in a few categories.
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Animal Sounds
Over 280 animal sounds available for free download. You can even read the provided description to know better about the particular animal sound.
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I Love Waves
ILovesWaves is your ultimate categorized .wav source. You can download sound effects from categories like animals, beeps and clicks, birds, cartoons, halloween, around the home, around the work place, insects, music, nature, people, vehicles and war.
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Simply The Best Sound
The sound files featured in SimplytheBest Sounds were gathered from various collections on the Internet, were created by our editors or submitted by their visitors.
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Zero 1 Media
Free wav sound samples from zero 1media. All sounds are in wav format. You can download sound inkickdrums, snaredrums, toms, highhats, loops, beat phrases, noises, voices, synth phrases, keyboards and synth sounds and effects.
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Boogie Jack
Funny, weird, annoying…you’ll find all kinds of sound effects at Boogie Jack.
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AutoSpeak
AutoSpeak Library of Sounds features the sounds of race cars, dragsters, motorcycles and other auto-related sounds.
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Special Operations
Special Operations offers free military sound effects for explosion sounds, battle sounds, machine gun sounds, rifle sounds, shortgun sounds, artillery sounds and others.
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Little Music Club
Littlemusicclub.com where you will find SERIOUS BIG sfx wavs that “rocks”and some other useful music links. For copyright purposes you should contact their respective owners by checking the properties section of each file where applicable.
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Guide to Animal Sounds on the Net
There are many samples of animal sounds on the World Wide Web and FTP sites, but finding them takes some patience and a bit of luck. This website provides a guide that much more convenient to have an index specifically for animal sounds.
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Stoutman’s Sounds
Sounds of all kinds for your listening and downloading pleasure! Stoutman’s Sounds is going to be putting up more sounds as time permits.
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Cool Wavs
Cool wavs is the place where you can look for some cool, funny, sexy wavs.
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Free Audio Clips
FreeAudioClips.com is loaded with tons of wav, midi and au files for your listening and downloading pleasure!
Select a category on the right and easily find what you’re looking for. Or, use the quick "audio clip keyword search" to search through the database for that special sound clip!
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Event Sounds
Event sounds lets you download wavs so you can change the sounds your computer makes such as startup sounds, mail sounds, shut down sounds, error sounds, movie sounds and tv sounds.
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WavCentral
All of WavCentral’s audio files have been databased and categorized — to make searching and accessing EASY. Over 504 sound effects are available for free download.

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WavPlanet
Wavplanet, the only audio page that lets users upload to its collection and has become one of the largest on the Internet with thousands of movie and TV files, hundreds of sound effects and MIDI files.
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Movie Sound Clips
More sound effects categories are currently being worked on Movie Sound Clips. That includes more updates for the current categories, especially weapon sound effects, as well as new object sound effects, answering machine messages and lots more.
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Wav-Sounds
Wav-Sounds.com is the family friendly wav site. The place to find some of the best free wav sound files around like Answering Machine Wav Sounds, Cartoon Wav Sounds, E-mail Wav Sounds, Funny Wav Sounds, Movie Wav Sounds, Parody Wav Sounds, Various Wav Sounds and Vehicle Wav Sounds.
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TalkingWav
Talkingwav.com offers thousands of free wav sound files to download, including answering machine messages, cartoon, comedy, music, movie and tv wav sounds, all fully categorized with descriptions. Plus loads of free mobile cell phone ringtones and videos.
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Tintagel’s Free Sound File Archive
Sound files at Tintagel are provided free of charge, without any representation or warranty whatsoever. To the best of our knowledge, all wave, midi, and audio files presented here are in the public domain and are available for use without restriction.
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Pachd
Over 80 free sound effects are available for download at Pachd.
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Amazing Sounds
Amazing sounds is where you will find all kinds of WAV files. Their database has more than 1.000 WAV Sounds for you to download, FREE!! Their content is made basically for multimedia developers or creators that want to use these files; so you won’t find a lot of movie, serial, or other sounds here.
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Wav Sound Files
A complete archive for wav sound files download.
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The Recordist
The Recordist presents a collection of free sound effects in MP3 format. These effects are from The Recordist SFX Library and the “Special Edition”. The MP3 stereo versions are high quality 44.1 192k compressed.
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Sound Jay
Sound Jay allows you to use the sounds on our website free of charge and royalty free in your projects but you are NOT allowed to post the sounds on any web site for others to download, link directly to individual sound files, or sell the sounds to anyone else.
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FreeSFX
The free sound effects found within the categories on the site are royalty-free and free to download and use within your audio/visual productions. You do not have to declare the useage of these sounds to any performing rights organizations.
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Sounds FX Page
Sounds FX Page has a small collection of Sounds FX files saved in WAV format. Instead of creating a rather humongous plethora of sound directories, they thought you would get more use out of a fairly small selection of really good sound files.
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Free Sound Effects
Free Sound Effects has converted our Stage Sounds Series so you can pick and choose your effects to create your own customized CD. The sound effects are available in a smaller MP3 format and a larger WAV file-self-extracting zip file.
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Water Sounds
A mini collection of water sounds for ocean surf, rain sounds, stream, water sounds and waterfall.
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3dmm Studio
The best movies always have great sound effects, and realistic background noises. So, to help you in your quest for better sounds, 3dmm Studio has compiled and categorised several sound packs. Rubin’s ‘3dmm Sound’ packs require you to import the .3mm file into your movie, where-as the packs complied by Will Cheyney are standard zips with categorised .wav files.
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Media College
MediaCollege.com is a free educational and resource website for all forms of electronic media. Topics include video & television production, audio work, photography, graphics, web design and more.They have hundreds of exclusive tutorials with supporting illustrations, videos, sound bytes and interactive features.
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Free Sound Effects Collections
Music for video provides different categories of sound effects and music clips. You can download and use these sounds for free on your video/multimedia productions. The sounds in this part of the website are mainly dedicated to people involved in video production , video montage ,multimedia projects and etc.
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Wav Surfer
Wav surfer provides free sound effects in wav files for movies, animals, musical, television and misc.
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A1 Prank Calls
A1 Prank Calls – The best free sounds, April Fools’ prank items and the funniest prank call humor.
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Sounds & Noise
Sounds & Noise provides free sound effects for animal sounds, human sounds, trains, planes and automobiles, weapons, horns, bells and whistles, sound of nature and household sounds.
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Posted by Kay in Tools , at 12.10.08 |
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Comments
BoltClock December 10th, 2008
Wow. Why do I get this feeling I want to start using Flash again?
Replydev December 11th, 2008
Great List of Websites To Download Free Sound Effects, thank again for awesome post
ReplyVivekanand December 11th, 2008
I want to Rock Now by seeing this list, Awesome Enough…..
Replysimplywit December 11th, 2008
Cool, Thanks for these resources.
ReplySkeku December 11th, 2008
Grrrreat!
ReplyErnesto Quezada December 11th, 2008
wow! nice list! I knew about 1/5 of them all ready but the rest come handy! Thanks a lot!
salut!
ReplyJoe | A New Band A Day.com December 11th, 2008
I can’t even begin to say how much time I’ve wasted in the past trying to fins exactly these kinds of sites. Thanks!
ReplyRahul December 12th, 2008
This is the post man. Just incredible. So many of softwares for sound effects.
ReplyTorley December 12th, 2008
Thanx for this compilation! I’ll keep it close.
I was rather fond of SoundSnap ( http://torley.com/soundsnap-rocks-what-are-your-fave-sound-search-sites ) but they’ve recently tightened up and become a pay-for site.
Generally, I wouldn’t mind that, but their prices are a lot more expensive than what I think is reasonable compared to other services, and I’m experiencing 503 errors. They didn’t even implement their upload system before the changes were made, which makes it feel rushed. Sad to see them slide down. :(
But on the upside, it’ll encourage traffic elsewhere, and hopefully drive healthy competition.
Replyedythemighty.com December 12th, 2008
Missing http://splicemusic.com IMO
Replygeekgrrl December 12th, 2008
http://www.dailywav.com is also a wonderful resource. He’s been at it for something like 10 years now. :)
Thanks for the great list. :D
ReplyPatareco December 12th, 2008
Thanks! Will be useful for my animations!
Replymac December 12th, 2008
one more awesome totally free site is http:www.freesoundeffectsandloops.com with both sfx and music loop wave files
thanks for the great list!
Replykalai selvan December 12th, 2008
i am p.kalai selvan this massege from (India)Tamilnadu state. basically i am animation students.i search many topic but your website very use full for me very thank u for help.
ReplyIsha December 13th, 2008
all these 55 sites are crap
they dont even play the samples…
befooling the buyer
Replyc.c December 16th, 2008
you can also get free soundtracks from freeplay.com
Replyjammer December 18th, 2008
What do you mean they don’t play the samples? They all work great! Maybe something’s wrong with your connection
ReplyEd December 20th, 2008
I like this a lot. I will use some of this on mu websites. Thanks a lot.
Replysagbee December 21st, 2008
wohhaa absolutely cool collection you made it :)
I like first five links… and finding my erotic sounds.. hehehe
Thanks again
Replysuresh December 23rd, 2008
i like all the links. try another site for free things: http://www.naughtymachine.com
ReplyLola Knopp December 23rd, 2008
An excellent article. I hadn’t heard of most of these sites. Very helpful!
Replycutt December 25th, 2008
great, this is what I’m looking for!!!
Replytahta December 26th, 2008
how to download a sound effect for free?
Replyphilsu December 30th, 2008
thx so much!
Replybut it looks like that some sites/links are error/find no page
D e n n i e January 3rd, 2009
Many thank you for information…. you are the best
ReplyStoryGas January 7th, 2009
Thanks for this awesome list — will be linking to you from my “blog for people who work in online drama”
Replyhttp://storygas.blogspot.com
George January 8th, 2009
Thanks for building this list. I would add Radio Daddy for those looking for free voiceovers for their projects.
Reply** **
#3 in the list is anything BUT free.
Erica Bontje January 9th, 2009
Voices.com has a great resource with royalty free music and sound effects. Check it out here:
http://www.voices.com/support/music-and-sound-effects.html
ReplyNicholas January 11th, 2009
I never know there’s so many site out there, I only know SoundSnap. =) Thanks.
ReplyDavid Holmes January 12th, 2009
Great compilation, thanks for sharing. I maintain a lens of similar free sound sites and applications at Free Sounds – Digital Audio Tools, Sound Sample Collections, Open Music Resources
Replyapmusicservices February 4th, 2009
Great website for musicians searching for new samples songs to include in their compositions.and some are download free. give thumbs up on stumble!!
Replyapmusicservices February 4th, 2009
This is really a great website for music lovers..and its free!..thanks for this!
ReplyChris February 19th, 2009
We’re relatively new, but I’m excited about the unique content on our site, http://www.mysoundfx.com.
ReplyJustin March 2nd, 2009
I love http://www.mysoundfx.com. Best free sounds I have found.
Replysam March 6th, 2009
I want worldwar2 serches
Replyrobinson March 9th, 2009
什么乱七八糟的 看不懂···
ReplyAriyo March 21st, 2009
checkout http://www.grsites.com and navigate to sound effects and volla! whole bunch of FREE sounds that you can play, listen and then download. Awesome resource.i Love it.
Replysandeep March 24th, 2009
hai friend, i am doing animation course , send me some links yar
ReplyKemal March 29th, 2009
hi ı am doing animation course ,, send me some link yar
Replylee comstock March 31st, 2009
What do ya mean free!? THEY HAVE SHOPPING CARTS AND PRICES.
ReplyKelly Sekon April 8th, 2009
The best selection on the web is http://www.sounddogs.com, it’s for Hollywood professionals but it’s priced for normal people.
Replyweb design April 19th, 2009
commented on some other post was looking for a post like this the other day for about 8 hours and i just stumble upon it here, nuts!
ReplyGregory April 20th, 2009
Thanks for these resources
ReplyAdrina samms April 20th, 2009
Wow visit this site to find Funny and Interesting cool Places to Visit in Kerala with full of wild animals water falls, tigers, elephants,boating, trekking back water
ReplySmileyi May 3rd, 2009
If your after sound effects you need to check out http://www.sound-effects-library.com …. It’s an English site so it’s all in pounds but the selection is awesome!
ReplyPandaboy May 9th, 2009
Don’t say it’s free when it’s not.
P.S.
ReplyYou suck.
William May 17th, 2009
There are some good old school hip hop samples for free at bringthenoise.weebly.com
Replyalan May 20th, 2009
Heres a new one for you all. Small amount now but fantastic quality.
http://www.soundscalpel.com/info/non-profit
ReplyMike June 11th, 2009
If you do a part 2 please include http://free-loops.com and http://soundbible.com both top notch sites
ReplySeeker July 25th, 2009
Can’t believe this site is not on the list:
http://www.wavsource.com
Over 6,500 wav files, all freely downloadable. It’s been on the web since 2001.
ReplySebastiaan August 21st, 2009
Our website, Splurgo Audio http://www.splurgo.com has also a nice amount of copyright free sound FX and the number of files is still growing!
ReplyWeb Tasar1m - Grafik Tasar1m September 1st, 2009
this, very thank..
ReplyYour site full professional…
Mixwerk September 7th, 2009
Here is one of the best sites for music in germany:
Replyhttp://www.bestservice.de. They got tons of CD`s for music production that are sometimes very good. You can prelisten them all and they are not so expensive.
Gsm Tamircisi September 27th, 2009
this is thank you..
very good..
ReplyJames Clewell October 2nd, 2009
These are awesome sound and audio effects.
ReplyThis is some pretty wild stuff.
The things we can do now with technology is amazing.
Dave October 8th, 2009
Jesus blood was tested!! http://www.arkdiscovery.com/videos.htm
ReplyBerita Harian October 17th, 2009
Another great sharing.
ReplyThanks pal! keep em coming :)
Alsen de Bak Eğlence Merkezi October 26th, 2009
this very thank you..
your web site very good..
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