For reasons way too complicated to explain, I was in need of a certain sound the other day, and after rummaging through several gigs of samples collected over the last 10 years on various hard drives I still couldn’t find what I was looking for (and it wasn’t on the U2 album either).
A quick trip to the BBC was fruitless (which was really strange), but Google found a contender.
The Freesound Project is a collaborative database of Creative Commons licensed sounds.
Creative Commons based sort of grabbed my attention.
The Freesound Project aims to create a huge collaborative database of sounds — audio snippets, samples, recordings, bleeps, etc., released under the Creative Commons Sampling Plus License. They provide new ways of accessing the samples, allowing users to browse the sounds using keywords (clearly indebted to Flickr, which has really set the standard for sharing for photographs) , a “sounds-like” type of browsing and more. You can upload and download sounds to and from the database.
They have only been around for around 12 months and the database has grown to 65,000 users and over 16,000 samples and thats a terabyte of data.
A valuable resource for anyone interested in making sound art or mash-ups.
If you have a spare beep or sample consider whacking it up.