Free sound effects – free WAV files plus links to the best sites

Free sites and sound libraries

Airborne Sound

A Toronto based website offering a range of free and paid sound effects made by a collective of professional field recordists from the area.

The free downloads focus around crowd, ambient, and construction sound across several packs in the 1.5GB range.

Downloads are available in 44.Khz 16bit and 96KHz 24bit files.

Paid and free content requires no attribution for the duration of the license, you can view the full license here.

Visit Airborne Sound

Free SFX

Featuring what can only be described as a ton of royalty-free sound and music files. Available for both personal and commercial projects. There are lots of categories to choose from, each with about or dozen or more sounds.

Files are available as 320 Kbps Mp3’s.

Attribution license requires a reference to the company.

Visit Free SFX

Freesound

Freesound has been offering a wealth of good quality files for well over a decade now.

All the content is uploaded by the community, so you get quite a bit of everything. A good site to find sounds for blending and mixing.

Files come in a range of lossless WAV/AIFF and lossy Mp3/AAC files.

Three licenses are on offer that each vary on the creative commons, for more information click here.

Visit Freesound

Zapsplat

The free sounds section claims over 44,842 sounds. That’s a lot! They pretty much have every major sound category you can think of.

Free sounds are available in Mp3 only and use their standard licensing model that requires attribution to their site. A paid tier is also available that offers WAVE files and no visible attribution.

Visit Zapsplat

Royalty-free sound effects download

By submitting the form above, you will receive an email with a downloadable file containing all of the following sound effects:

Shots

  • Rewind Swipe
  • Rapid Fire Sputter Shots
  • Razor Buzz By 
  • Fly By Sizzle

Alarms & Bells

  • Door Bell
  • School Bell 
  • Meltdown Alarm 
  • Telephone Ring

Animals

  • Tiger

Cars

  • Ferrari Testarossa
  • Police Car Chase

Doors

  • Castle Drawbridge
  • Jail Door

Explosions

  • Howitzer Cannon
  • Sharp Explosion
  • Robot Quack Quack Boom

Environment

  • Arctic Wind Drone 
  • Thunder
  • Pipe Howl Rumble
  • Loon Calls
  • Forest Daytime

Footsteps

  • Female Footsteps

Impacts

  • Glass Smash
  • Low Crashy Metal Hit 
  • Roof Crash 

Mechanical

  • Electrical Spark 
  • Squeeze Toy 

Music & Rhythm

  • Horror Rhythm Pattern
  • Swelling Evil Sweep 
  • Subliminal Record Scratch 
  • Timpani
  • Panned Stab Flourish

Sports

  • Basketball Practice 

Voice

  • Booing Crowd
  • Cartoon Head Shake
  • Banshee
  • Comedy Burp