Surely you have ever needed to find royalty-free audio files that you can use in your projects without infringing copyrights but, do you know where to look? Do you trust what you find? In this article we will show you some of the best audio banks where you can download sounds under free licenses. Most of the music they offer does not come from well-known artists such as Taylor Swift or Ed Sheeran but that does not mean that music from independent artists is bad. It can also be useful to give originality to the soundtrack of a video, a presentation, a website, an application or in many other cases.
Freesound
It has a selection of effects classified according to the type of license it contains. To share your sound effects with the FreeSound community just register and upload them to your account. The sound library is quite extensive, you can find any rare effect you have in mind. As easy to use as it is, you just have to register and you can start downloading sounds. One of the peculiarities it offers is the Free Sound Recorder that allows you to record in streaming. It also has a social network utility, allowing you to communicate with other people interested in locating sounds.
Jamendo
With an intuitive design, this community of independent artists has several tools to create playlists, rate the music, request songs that match your tastes… As soon as you enter their website you are offered several options:
- Free streaming – Free download
- Music for videos – Browse the catalog
- Radio channels for stores – See offer
It also does not require you to register, you can use the platform as a guest user to download everything you want in excellent quality. It has up to 3 million songs available and a huge variety of genres to choose from for free and legally thanks to
NoiseTrade
This site also has a very simple and elegant interface that also facilitates navigation through the different sections (blues, jazz, pop, classical, metal, rock, dance, etc). This site has a great variety of musical genres with a lot of artists in their lists and their videos posted on Youtube. The downloads are free but if you wish you have the option to tip the artists to support them to promote their music.
Freeplay Music
You will find high quality music under Creative Commons license. You can listen to the music in the player of the page before downloading it. This is the ideal website if you are looking for music for non-commercial projects. Here you will find a lot of music and sounds of very good quality.
Free Music Archive
This page is a trunk of memories that stores many works whose copyrights have expired due to antiquity, works of Public Domain. Here we can find genres such as jazz, blues or classical music for example. Keep in mind that these are multimedia files (videos, music and other artistic works) that are already old.
FlashKit
The best resource for downloading Sound FX, loops and a great variety of sound effects. In this community what is shared are not musical themes but sound clips and musical effects divided by categories and ready to download and use in the creation of videos or other works. It offers you tutorials and forums to share opinions and knowledge with other people and learn audio effects to make your presentations more special.
Audionity
This independent community of Spanish composers offers royalty-free music. One of the peculiarities is that the music goes directly from the author to the producer and therefore there is no need to pay royalty management societies as the musicians participating in this platform do not belong to the SGAE, ASCAP, BMI or any other similar organization.
A good complement to this list of download pages is Audacity, a free audio editor that you can download for free. It serves for editing your audio tracks and is the perfect tool to get you started in editing. It is really easy and fast to import and export your podcasts in any format. In addition, among other features, it has different effects that allow you to eliminate the annoying background noise, for example.
Don’t hesitate to let us know if you have tried any of these sites or others!
