Sound effect libraries

[DELTAtheDboi005]

I have a major complaint regarding them sound effect libraries on the internet, Well it's not that big of a deal, But hear me out:

Sound effect libraries... are dogcrap...
Have you noticed that nearly EVERY sound effect site requires you to login or register, have you noticed that some sound effect sites need you to pay them to get sounds?
Have you noticed that ACTUALLY FREE sound effect libraries that don't need you to login don't contain that many sounds?, and why do some sites like audiojungle have to
have pesky audio watermarks?, and why do some sites only have premium downloads and nothing else?. A quick word to the people who conceived of this idea: If your sound effect library site says free, but needs people to login or register to download sounds, have audio watermarks, have only premium downloads only and doesn't contain that many sounds, then it's essentially failed it's one, singular job...


I can't be the only guy that thinks this, do you guys agree, or not?

[wildweasel]

If you aren't able to find anything useful on something like Freesound.org, see if you can locate copies of the SONNISS GDC audio libraries (they're smaller portions of commercial libraries, released in several-gigabyte torrents, around the time of each year's Game Developers Conference). You might also be able to find libraries on Archive.org, though be especially careful of what licenses they're released under.

Do bear in mind, since I recall Freesound.org does require a login, is that they may be requiring logins to stop bots from mass-downloading the entire website and costing them enormous amounts of bandwidth.

[leileilol]

i'd suggest opengameart for sounds, but there's been many times when some just upload apparent SoundIdeas materials masquerading as original work (sometimes behalfing from another "free sounds" site to avoid accountability), so be legally paranoid there too. This matters more now because contentID can match commercial sound effects regardless of their royalty-free status.


Sound design's a big commercial field. All the famous libraries require licensing, and some sounds are 'dull' because they're probably raw 24-bit sounds for an engineer to work with to make something out of it. The most no-catch 'free' sound site you'll find are probably old crusty 8khz mp3s for flash animators that mostly are distantly derived off SoundIdeas by proxy of game rips (in a similar manner of how Descent explosion and Hexen metal wall gets around)

[DELTAtheDboi005]

A great example of such a good sound library would be mixkit, it has HEAPS of preset sounds and you don't need to login to download.
link to mixkit: https://mixkit.co/

[DELTAtheDboi005]

And here's a link to their sound library: https://mixkit.co/free-sound-effects/

[Proydoha]

I can't vouch for their content because I've never needed audio samples but there are Sonniss free audio bundles from 2015-2020.
You don't need to register to download them but you also can't preview them:
https://sonniss.com/gameaudiogdc

[DELTAtheDboi005]

I tried sonniss but the libraries are HUGE and a popup appeared saying they collect data and stuff... So basically sonniss.com is getting a no from me, I'd rather get sounds from stuff like extracting sounds from quake or other, sound effect libraries, archive.org or other means of grabbing sounds like that.

[wildweasel]

and a popup appeared saying they collect data and stuff...

So do we.