15 Royalty Free Audio Banks and Sound Effects

If you are a musician you will know that you are always looking for that distinctive little sound that gives a special touch to one of your new compositions. For practically any audiovisual creation, be it a song, a short, an advertisement or a work for class, the fact of being able to have a collection of sounds and special effects, in short, of a good bank of audios, it is really indispensable. Do you need free sounds for video games? Looking for copyright-free audio tracks for your YouTube videos? Well, keep reading!

The 15 best websites to download royalty-free free sounds

In today's post we are going to review some of the most remarkable royalty-free audios and sound effects webpages. The best free resources on the Internet to feed and enrich our tracks and compositions.

Partners In Rhyme

Here we can find plenty of good quality, royalty-free sounds, of all types and colors. Just right-click and "Save As ..." to download the desired audio track in WAV format. No registration required.

It also has music classified in different categories, such as horror, corporate, country, romantic music, and a long etcetera.

Enter Partners in Rhyme

Incompetech

In Incompetech we will find an extensive catalog of free audio files with a Creative Commons license. It has a large number of songs with synthesizers and the like that are great if we are developing retro 8-bit games.

We can download the songs in MP3 format. The best of all is that some tracks even include the sheet music, something that we can take advantage of if we have some knowledge of music.

Enter Incompetech

Ministry of Education and Culture

On the website of the Ministry of Education you can find thousands of free sounds, plus images, videos and animations. Have about 6000 free audio sounds, where we can find from animal sounds to female computer voices. All audios are available under a Creative Commons license and no registration is required to download. All audios are available in WAV, MP3 and OGG.

As a detail, we must bear in mind that this sound bank works with Flash Player, so we will have to enable it in our browser if it is disabled (otherwise we will not be able to see the list of available audios and everything will appear blank).

Access the sound bank of the Ministry of education

ZapSplat

In ZapSplat we have an interesting section with free sound effects for video games. Here we will mainly discover interactive audios to give feedback to the user during the gameplay. For example, sounds of "level completed", "failed", "you win", "collect stars", "coins", and so many others.

Some other categories on this website contain clues that may also be useful to us, such as "alert" tones, the appearance of messages on the screen and others. If we do not find the sound we are looking for, they also allow us to write to them so they can give us a hand.

Enter ZapSplat

FlashKit

FlashKit has a wide variety of sounds that we will probably not find on other types of similar websites. It also requires no registration to download, and just right-click to save the file in MP3 format.

As we can see in the screenshot below, the catalog of FX sounds is very varied, with a large number of interface and instrument sounds.

Enter Flashkit

AudioMicro

The AudioMicro website has an interesting repository of free sounds. A most appropriate place if we want download ambient soundsSuch as parties, fireworks, amusement parks and the like.

Downloads require registration, but luckily we can skip it by logging in with accounts like Facebook, Google, Twitter, and more.

Enter AudioMicro

Soundbible

SoundBible has a large library of sounds of public domain, Creative Commons license and personal use. With a very useful search engine that helps to find exactly what we are looking for, it allows you to download audio in both MP3 and WAV formats.

Among his audios we can find sounds of all kinds, from a UFO, through a Harley Davidson, wind and rain or Morse code.

Enter SoundBible

Unity Asset Store

If you are a video game developer, it is likely that you have used the Unity engine in one of your projects (or are using it right now). In the Unity asset store we will find 100% free music and audio tracks: FX sound effects, background music and a section with the most downloaded audios.

These sounds can only be downloaded from Unity, although luckily it is a totally free tool (even for games for commercial purposes).

Access the Unity Asset Store

GRSites

GRSites has a wide collection of effects and sounds to download for free, both in WAV and MP3 format. The only downside is that it does not have a search engine to speed up the "hunting" of the desired audio, and that it requires a purchase if you want to give commercial use to any of its tracks.

Although we can download the sound tracks one by one, the page also gives us the option of downloading almost 2000 audios in one go, making a purchase worth $ 19.95.

Enter GRSites

OpenGameArt

OpenGameArt is one of the best free sprite repositories on the internet. The good thing is that in addition to being a delicious pixel art font, it also has an important audio and music section for video games.

Tracks can be filtered by tags and license type (CC, GPL, LGPL, OGA). All music and sounds can be downloaded without registration.

Enter OpenGameArt

99Sounds

99Sounds is one more website oriented to the musical world. It does not have as many effects and it does not have a search engine, but it does have a lot of sounds to use in your compositions, as well as several VST plugins and samples Of battery. No registration required.

Personally, I think it is one of the most interesting places if we are musicians and we are looking for inspiration and new sounds. In one of their latest updates, for example, they just released a set of underwater and space exploration sound effects that is priceless. Highly recommended.

Enter 99Sounds

Sshhtt!

Sshhtt! is another free audio effects download website, and this time in Spanish. It has a very positive point, and that is people value audios and you can see your score next to each track.

Previously, the website required registration to be able to download the sound files, but now they no longer require this requirement, so it is enough to select the track, right-click with the mouse and select "Save as ..." to download without further restrictions. .

Enter Sshhtt!

FreeSound

The only downside to FreeSound is that it is necessary to register to be able to download, because on the other hand, has it all. It has a blog where they have the latest news, a fairly active forum and even a very useful search engine on the top side of the web. It is not just a repository where you can find sounds, in FreeSound there is life.

Enter FreeSound

Youtube

Sometimes you don't have to look far to find a good sound library. Within one's own Creator Studio, Youtube has an audio library with a large number of free songs, music and sound effects. Easy to use and download.

In addition to this, and without having to leave YouTube, we can also do a search within the video platform. Thus, if we write terms like "Free sound effects" we can access hundreds of videos from where we can download a lot of fx sounds and audios for our creations.

Noise for Fun

This is the ideal page for software and video game developers. Created in 2011 by Filippo Vicarelli, it has a large bank of audios and effects that also do not require any type of registration or login to be downloaded. The sounds are classified by categories or game genres, thus facilitating navigation and search within the web.

Enter Noise for Fun

Have you previously visited any of these websites? What did you think? Ah! And if you know of any other quality page with free sounds for download, don't hesitate to share it in the comments area.