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Sound effects libraries where the file names and metadata follow the Universal Category System (UCS), championed by renowned sound supervisor Tim Nielsen & more
‘Tropical Ambiences’ delivers 52 pure, immersive tropical soundscapes, meticulously collected from each subset of tropical ecosystems in extremely-bio-diverse Central America.
It includes rainforests (jungle), cloudforests, dry forests, mangroves, and many other settings.
Recorded at different times of the day and spanning diverse range of weather conditions with various scale of rain and wind forces, this sound pack provides access to a complete array of wild tropical soundscapes.
Each of the 52 files is a careful selection of 1 to 4 minutes high-quality binaural stereo ambiences.
It has been precisely produced so that each track is able to LOOP in a seamless manner allowing for the ambience to last as long as desired, and the files are embedded with metadata (Soundminer/iXML/XMP/BWAV/ID3). The metadata descriptions provide the identification of many animal species from the recordings.
In total, this library delivers more than 2 hours of pristine, tropical ambiences.
Extensive humanoid creatures actions, emotions and reactions.
The “Yeti Monster” library is an extensive collection of rare humanoid creature sounds. They were carefully recorded, edited, classified, thoroughly metatagged. It comprises expressive cinematic designed sounds with over 25 different type of articulations, actions and reactions; as well as cartoon-like interpretations.
Ultra High Samplerate
More than 10 real voice actors were recorded for this library. The unique Sanken Co-100K microphone captured an astounding broad frequency spectrum, up to 100KHz. Thus allowing for extra pitching and treatment on the signal while keeping its natural character! The impressive result are authentic realistic ape-like creature sounds which will surely bring an added value to your projects.
Versatile Humanoid Sounds
Over 25 different articulations, actions, emotions and reactions included. These sounds are suitable for yetis, bigfoots but also for any humanoid or ape-like monsters! It is delivered in 192Khz which allows for additional pitchings and treatments.
Introducing part 2 of the ‘Open & Close’ sound effects library. It brings you even more versatile sounds of various things that can be opened and/or closed. Obviously there are again several doors, hatches and drawers – but also lots of other opening and closing sound effects that will come in handy in your everyday sound design work, most with several variations. Be sure to check out the sound list below.
You can use the sounds as they are or use them for intense sound design. All sounds were cleaned, edited and filled with BWF-Metadata for instant use in your projects.
Sources include:
Ashtray Lid • Backpack • Handbag • Bag Suitcase • Beltbag • Blanket • Box Plastic • Cabinet Door • Cardboard Box • Cardboard Tube • Carryall • Clasp • Coffee Machine Lid • Cooking Pot Lid • Cupboard Door • Curtain Shower • Dishwasher Hatch • Door, Apartment • Door, Balcony •
Door Basement • Door, Bathroom • Door, Glass • Door, Metal • Door, Squeaks • Door, Wood • Drawer, Cardboard • Drawer, Cloth • Drawer, Construction Plans • Drawer, Dishwasher • Drawer, Kitchen • Drawer, Metal • Drawer, Oven Baking Plates • Drawer, Plastic • Drawer, Wood • Drawer, Wood Cutlery • Elevator • Hand Drill Battery Slot • Handbag Leather • Hatch,_Bread Box • Hatch, Metal • Hatch, Oven • Hatch, Plastic Freezer • Hatch, Plastic Lose • Hatch, Plastic Printer • Hatch, Plastic Tape • Hatch, Plastic Tiny • Hatch, Plastic Vacuum Cleaner • Hatch, Plastic Vacuum Cleaner Hose • Hatch, Washing Machine • Jar Nutella • Lock_Combination Suitcase • Lock Basement Door • Lock Old Door • Microwave • Notebook Bag • Pedal Bin Lid • Plastic Bag • Plastic Sachet • Plastic Tube Small • Refridgerator Door • Rolling Shutter Garage • Safe • Schoolbag • Shirt Button • Sliding Door Cupboard • Sliding Door Shower • Sliding Door Wood • Sports Bag • Stapler Gun • Tin Box Lid • Tin Flask • Tin Lunch Box • Toilet Seat • Toolbox • Trashcan Lid • Vacuum Cleaner Battery • Vacuum Cleaner Dust Tank • Vacuum Cleaner Filter • Velcro • Waterboiler Lid • Window • Window Roller Shutter • Window Tilt • Zipper •
In Residential Ambiences you will get the sounds of 15 different recordings of residential atmospheres with a duration of 10 minutes each so there’s no need to loop.
Recordings have been done during five different periods of a day. Each one includes three versions:
Recordings feature sounds such as dozens of birds singing in the early morning, dove calls in the morning as the same time traffic gets noisier, human activities in the background in the afternoon distant traffic and voices in the evening, and sirens wailing in distance at night.
Some of the birds included are: doves, sparrows, crows, a cock, woodpeckers, blackcaps, magpies, and pigeons.
Since some of the files are extremely quiet (mainly in the evening and at night), descriptive markers have been included to highlight interesting events in an otherwise featureless waveform. These markers can be read in programs such as Izotope RX, Reaper, and Soundminer. The markers are also included as .txt files in separate folder.
All files have been recorded in 96 kHz/24 bit with Soundminer and BWAV embedded metadata.
UCS Compatible Metadata embedded. Fields included CatID, Category, Subcategory, FX Name, Filename, Description, BWDescription, Library, RecType, RecMedium, Microphone, Designer, Manufacturer, Keywords.
Machine Emanation is a contact microphone and drone sound effects library focused on machines. It contains multiple recordings and designed drones sourced from band saw to ceiling fan; table saw to dishwasher, thickness planer to paper shredder; bench grinder to refrigerator. Machines were recorded turning on and off, running, and at any available speeds.
Also included are drones designed from each machine. Power tools and appliances are re-imagined as dark rumbling drones and unique atmospheres. A small glimpse of what can be created with Machine Emanation.
Lakes, rivers, oceans and waterfalls. Whether you’re looking for a gentle lapping river, dense rapids, calm lake waves lapping on the beach, giant crashing waves, tumultuous waves rolling through rocky shores, or jungle waterfalls — we have you covered.
Explore US waterways with Soundopolis from Michigan to Virginia Beach to Hawaii, and back again!
Water is a collection covering splashes, movements, pouring, waterfalls, faucets, toilets, showers, fountains, sewage drains, drips, bubbles, boiling, water pipe smoking, and even ice cracking, impacts and scrapes. We have you covered for all of your water needs.
Birds – Avifaunistic – Ornithology
In this library, I gathered 250 clean recordings of songs & calls of some of the most common and some rare birds from Europe and Asia. Many of them also live in Africa (all year or during winter) and a few also live in Australia, New Zealand or America.
These recordings are ideal to fill in gaps in dialogue (as background sweetener), create authentic landscapes, to use as a original bird voice or to create creatures from pitching & editing the recordings. Bird vocalization is great to set a mood in a game or a movie. Use the nightingale to create a romantic atmosphere or use some gulls to create a place near the water.
The focus is on clean single bird song & call recordings.
All recordings (except one) have been made in the nature; of wild birds. Although I used a broad variety of techniques and technic and have been out in the meadows, woods, mountains, and riverbanks often as early as 3 am, on some recordings, due to the habitat these animals live in, there are other birds or other noise (of course very low in volume) in the background. Some recordings are heavily edited, to isolate the voice, so you can place the song in any ambiance, others didn’t need any editing except a simple low cut.
I also included a few ambiances where two or more bird species are dominant.
All recordings have the English, the scientific (Latin), and the German name in the metadata. I also included the distribution and the habitat. That way it will be easy for you to create an authentic soundscape depending on the region and landscape you are trying to represent in your media.
Another big part of the library is the “Build Your Own Bird” part.
I extracted single beeps, chirps, screams & pecking and you can easily build a very own bird species from these recordings, that are named with tonal information. So it is easier to build a sad or happy vocalization. Or a robot bird. I didn’t tune the chirps to allow more natural results when creating your own species. When playing along music, you should sometimes tune the sounds to the root key, given in the name of the file.
The 61 bird species voices included are:
Blackcap, Black Bird, Black Grouse, Black Headed Gull, Bluethroat, Blue Tit, Bullfinch, Canada Goose, Carrion Crow, Chiffchaff, Coal Tit, Cockatiel (Escape), Common Buzzard, Common Chaffinch, Common Kingfisher, Common Firecrest, Common Raven, Common Swift, Common Wood Pigeon, Corn Crake, Cuckoo, Coot, Dunnock, Eurasian Golden Oriole, Eurasian Nuthatch, Eurasian Oystercatcher, Eurasian Skylark, European Robin, Egyptian Goose, Gardenwarbler, Goldcrest, Great Tit, Greylag Goose, Great Cormorant, Great Crested Grebe, Great Spotted Woodpecker, Greater Flamingo, Greater White-Fronted Goose, Greenfinch, Grey Heron, House Sparrow, Lesser Spotted Woodpecker, Long-Tailed Tit, Mallard, Marsh Tit, Marsh Warbler, Nightingale, Northern Lapwing, Reed Warbler, Short Toed Treecreeper, Song Thrush, Spotted Flycatcher, Tawny Owl, Tree Pipit, Treecreeper, Tufted Duck, White Backed Woodpecker, White Wagtail, White Throat, Willow Warbler, Yellowhammer
There are also a few wings, flocks, pecking and recordings of juvenile birds included.
Please note, I respected the flight distance of all the birds, stayed on the path, and didn’t approach nests (I built a nesting box and included a lav and a long cable, I can only encourage to do the same). The recordings were made during countless sessions in Essen, Bottrop (Kirchheller Heide), Duesseldorf (Urdenbacher Kaempe), Zwillbrocker Venn, and Oberammergau.
In addition, I am not an ornithologist. I listened back to all recordings with the Macaulay Library to verify my classifications and checked with experts, were in doubt. I am confident, I got all of them right, but if you feel like a call or a song belongs to another bird species, please let me know.
If you are looking for a specific bird species please check the file sheet prior to buying. While most birds have multiple calls & songs in this library, some may have one file with a single call only.
The naming structure is compliant with the Universal Category System (UCS).
Unleash the magic of slow motion with our exciting new sound effects library, “Slow Motion”! Imagine the delightful crunch of fresh fruit as it falls into liquid, the mesmerising swirl of a drink, or water as it freezes. Perfect for commercials and creative projects alike, this library is an essential addition to your sound design arsenal. Get ready to turn every moment into an auditory feast.
Personal Cassette Player_Pack 02 is the 2nd in the Personal Cassette Player Collection. In this pack are recordings of the Sony VOR Cassette Player/ Recorder. Click record and make your own recording. Press play and listen back, but don’t forget to rewind it first! Included are different buttons and sliders including the Fast Playback, Mic Sensitivity, and Pause Switch. Slide the tape in the compartment, turn it in your hand, fast forward to the end, or take the batteries out.
All metadata updated using the Universal Category System in Soundminer, Basehead, and Soundly. Recorded at 24 Bit, 192kHz using the Sennheiser MKH8050, MKH30 microphone combo into a Sound Devices Mix Pre-6.
Plug in those headphones, sit back, relax, and listen to your favorite classic cassette tapes.
Looking for regular phone sounds? It’s A Plain Phone is available as three packs (and a bundle):
It’s A Plain Phone_Pack 01:
It’s A Plain Phone_Pack 01 is what it says it is… a single phone; many different buttons, switches, sliders, and pick up and hang ups. There are slams and aggressive button pushing for when you need to forget you were ever on the phone. Can’t forget to squeeze the plastic body on the phone and base. Over 2208 sounds are in this pack over two different microphones, or 1104 per microphone. Wrapped up in a nice digital bow as 112 files recorded at 96 kHz, 24 Bit using the Sennheiser MKH60 and Sennheiser MKH8050 microphones. Exported mono .wav files.
It’s A Plain Phone_Pack 02:
It’s A Plain Phone_Pack 02 is a single recorded phone, PLAIN and simple. This phone is meant to be mounted vertically. Included in this pack are each number button, 0-9, # (pound), * (asterisk), and other switches and levers. There are also slams and aggressive buttons pushing, rattles and squeezing. Over 2026 sounds are included in this pack using two different microphones, or 1013 per microphone. A total of 116 files recorded at 96 kHz, 24 Bit using the Sennheiser MKH60 and Sennheiser MKH8050 microphones. Exported mono .wav files.
It’s A Plain Phone_Pack 03:
It’s A Plain Phone_Pack 03 is the third installment in the It’s A Plain Phone Collection. This pack includes a single phone, that is meant to be mounted vertically. Press each and every button, 0-9, # (pound), * (asterisk), mute redial, and emergency buttons.
Pick up and the slam the phone down in anger. Slide any of the switches or shake it up!
All are metadata tagged and updated using the Universal Category System in Soundminer, Basehead, and Soundly. You can also get all three libraries in a bundle for some nice savings.
Bringing every classic Anime Sound to your local sound library! Find the true sound of it with Vadi Sound Library.
About Anime
From laser beams to cartoony bird calls, upwelling whistles to stuttering magic spells in 105 24bit/96khz WAV files. With Anime you can meet every need from video games to animation projects.
Inspired by classic Japanese anime, Anime gives you access to transitions, animals, arcade whooshes, fight, magic, cartoony, water, whistle sound effects that you need for your related projects and also lots of room for further sound design with the flexible texture of the sounds for customization. We paid attention to richness of layers in each sound using powerful organic sounds and many synthesizers.
This is a rare SFX pack that has sounds of numerous actions with easy to navigate naming. It is a thoroughly researched collection capturing the core of Anime sound effects, with high resolution sound effects, prepared in collaboration with anime art collectors.
What else you may need
You may also want to check out our Ambiences from Japan Pack for access to location ambiences of Japan: Nara, Osaka and Kyoto; Bamboo forests, subways, train ambiences and motorways and exterior interior walla including tourists, school kids, pedestrians, various animals, streets, street musicians and announcement sounds from Japan in 155 files.
Wind Textures II continues with the series started on Wind Textures. New textures and locations have been included in this collection in order to make it as diverse as possible.
Cuff ‘Em is a collection of all things handcuff. Lock up the villain using the Smith & Wesson 100-1 series nickel plated carbon steel handcuff. Use the key to unlock and unlatch to make your escape. Pick up and drop the cuffs on numerous surfaces. Surfaces include: Wood Table, Resonant Wood Table, Carpet, Carpeted covered Hardwood, Hardwood Floor, Two Metal Tables, Resonant Metal Table, Chaise Lounge, and Leather Drum Stool. Also included is opening and closing of the latches, fidget and jiggle around, spin on different surfaces, and more!
60 files, 51 minutes, with over 2,285 sounds in total! Recordings decoded from MS into stereo using the Sennheiser MKH8050, MKH30 microphones into a Sound Devices Mix Pre-6 Recorder.
All files are metadata tagged and updated using the Universal Category System in Soundminer, Basehead, and Soundly.
A SOUND COLLECTION THAT ROCKS
Packed with the breaking, cracking, falling, rolling, rattling, dragging and shattering of stones, rocks, bricks, pebbles, gravel, sand and porcelain, Stones and Debris offers you a great selection of ultra-realistic sound effects. Use the recordings to flexibly create all types of stone debris, from settling dust and small falling stones to large rock avalanches or massive destruction.
In addition to the source recordings, this package includes a range of pre-designed destruction sounds of collapsing buildings and walls, huge cracks, landslides as well as dumping rubble. These sounds will help you on the fly when everything breaks, a city is under attack and houses collapse after an explosion or earthquake.
RECORDED WITH ACOUSTIC PRECISION
We have spared no effort in creating a highly versatile tool of stone recordings. Besides the sessions in our studio, we captured the sounds in quarries, abandoned buildings, forests and volcanic landscapes to get as many different stones and rocks as possible. Stones and Debris gives you maximum flexibility to layer, transform or create new sounds and adds detailed textures to your projects.
Foliage Sweeteners are great for characters creeping around in the bushes, running through the trees, or just walking through the park. You can add specific environmental sounds to your ambiences, such as individual leafy tree branches that dip into frame, or cattails and bushes reacting to a gust of wind. These sounds are also great for nature documentary, whether you have a squirrel climbing a tree, a bear plowing through a forest, a cheetah stalking from the underbrush, or just a cow eating grass.
A sound library of the organic electronic world of inherent signal noise created from analog sources.
Sounds include hum, buzz, hiss, static, distortion & overdriving, feedback loops, signal malfunction, dropouts, crackling, fuzz, and glitch.
Introducing our “Bouncing Balls” sound effects library. Dive into an assortment of bouncing balls bouncing across various surfaces both indoors and outdoors.
Our library features an eclectic mix, including the soft thud of a toddler’s play ball to the distinct bounce of a yoga ball. Whether you’re scoring sound for an energetic sports scene or looking for that whimsical touch to enhance your project. Ball types included: soccer ball, football, yoga ball, beach ball, tennis ball, kids ball.
Introducing the “Modern Seating” sound effects library. Your ultimate audio toolkit for chair sounds! This collection captures contemporary seating from sleek office chairs to chic home lounges.
Gone are the days of using generic creaks and groans! Forget the distracting creaking or the uncertainty of fragile furniture. Here, you’ll find the authentic, subtle nuances of modern seating, including smooth rolls, graceful pickups, and lively movements.
Unsettling Creaks and Squeaks – Extension I is the first extension to the very popular “Unsettling Creaks and Squeaks” sound library.
It delivers door and furniture creaks and squeaks, creaking leather, rubber and balloons, door handles, disturbing metal on metal squeaks and much more.
This sound effects library is a composite collection of 345 files with even more single sounds of unsettling and and unpleasant squeaking and creaking elements. It’s a great starting point for designing a vast number of different soundscapes in various genres – from just using the sounds as general Hard Effects, through Science Fiction to Horror. All sounds are production ready: Cleaned, edited and leveled, and all with with embedded BWF Metadata.
A collection of rail sounds captured in Italy, including sounds of trams (cable cars), trains and subways.
The library contains sounds like arrivals, departures, pass-bys and on-board recordings. Metallic wheel sounds, pneumatic doors opening and closing, crowds / passengers, and engine sounds are also captured.
Both interior and exterior recordings are included, as well as PA announcements in Italian.
Each sound file has been carefully named and tagged for easy search in Soundminer and is Universal Category System (UCS) compliant.
(see the full track list below).
“Quiet Interior Ambiences” is a collection of 3 libraries or a total of 152 files that are recorded in various quiet hotels and empty schools. Inside you will find more than 15 GB and over 8 hours of high-quality quiet ambiences.
Quiet Hotels At Night Vol 1:
Quiet Hotels At Night is the first one of themed library series in which you’ll go through night hotels. The package includes 27 stereo tracks with evening and night atmospheres from hotel corridors and rooms. The library is recorded mostly in large hotels in Bulgaria, Sweden and Romania. You will hear a variety of quiet atmospheres from empty corridors and rooms, air conditioners, bathrooms, an empty lobby bar with working refrigerators, to low activity from neighbouring rooms and backgrounds, screaming from a distant room, etc. Room tones and ambiеnces are suitable background for any audiovisual projects.
All files are meta-tagged in Soundminer
Gear used: Sound Devices 633. Neumann KM184 stereo set, Sennheiser MKH8020 stereo set
Quiet Hotels At Night Vol 2:
“Quiet Hotels At Night Vol. 2” is the second part of our most popular library “Quiet Hotels At Night”. Comprised of the best pieces of several years of recordings. Imagine you are in a game or a security guard who is doing his regular tour. You find yourself in different corridors, rooms, and stairwells, even in the kitchen of a restaurant late at night. Through the recordings, you can experience a wide variety of settings – from riding a hotel elevator to looking around the lobby. The idea of the library is to include a rich variety of room tones and quiet atmospheres very early in the morning, late in the evening, or at night. The atmospheres in hotels of different sizes and stages of construction are quite distinctive because of their different reverberation, density of walls, doors, etc. Most of the library is focused around silence. You can hear photo-cell lighting at times, distant faint voices at others, or just sporadic sounds coming from places such as doors or footsteps from an upper floor. The stairwells are also very interesting as you can hear the sound of moving elevators stopping on another floor or the sound of pure electricity. This library sequel also includes atmospheres from the interior of moving elevators. You will hear the sound of doors closing, traveling, and doors opening. Room tones from a handful number of bathrooms are included as well. This library has been recorded in Eastern Europe and more specifically in Bulgaria which makes the atmospheres even more diverse and intriguing.
All of the files are carefully and thoroughly meta-tagged in UCS.
Gear used:
Recorders: Sound Devices 833, 664, Sony PCM D100, Zoom H6,
Microphones: Neumann KM184 mP, Usi Pro
Quiet School Ambiences:
Sound Tailor – Boat Horns
Imagine you had a real color palette when it comes to boat horn sounds. That is now possible with Sound Tailor Effects Library new release.
In the heart of Burgundy, in central France, we met with this passionate boat horn chaser and collector who has managed, through years of research, to acquire one of the largest boat horns collection in the world. In a quiet field, we captured these incredibly loud horns, from close to distant spots, with a variety of static and dynamic microphones.
This library includes 33 unique boat horns, organized in a chromatic scale, from A2 to F#5. We recorded 4 blasts of each horn, from short to long ones, for convenient editing. Each horn comes in 3 audio files, with 3 different microphone perspectives:
They have the same length and can be easily combined for more sonic possibilities.
In addition, you get recordings of an air siren, custom made from a boat horn, and 5 edited loops of it, plus 3 different train steam whistles.
Boat Horns contains more than 22,41 GB / 252 Files.
WHAT’S INSIDE
All files are 24Bit/192kHz WAV Surround / LCR & 24Bit/48kHz Stereo Version files.
All meticulously embedded with Soundminer & UCS Metadata.
INCLUDED SOUNDS – KEYWORDS
AIR SIREN, BOAT, BOAT HORN, CUSTOM HORN, DISTANT SIREN, HARBOR, HARBOUR, OCEAN, SEA, SHIP, SIREN, STEAM WHISTLE, SURROUND, TRAIN
Low-price. High-quality. Essential.
A collection of 50 heartbeat sounds, including various regular and fast heart-racing loops of different types.
The sounds are fully compatible with the Universal Category System (UCS) – a public domain initiative establishing a standardized category list for the classification of sound effects.
Note: All of these sounds (and more!) are included in the 96 General Library (get 3,000+ SFX for FREE!)
With A Sound Effect, Asbjoern has created a web site where our international community can browse, learn, and share the vast fruits of our labors. Together we are accelerating the very real potential power of sound design as a recognized art form.
A Sound Effect is an excellent resource for us to keep our animated films sounding unique and exciting.
A Sound Effect is a great asset to have discovered.
We found the site very easy to navigate, purchasing and downloads were effortless and the effects themselves are awesome! Asbjoern has done us all a great service.
We’ll definitely be back!
There are many great independent sound effect libraries available these days. The main problem with having so many, is keeping track of them!
A Sound Effect is a great hub, and is one of the first places I visit to look for sounds by category or genre. I started coming here to see if I could find libraries that I knew I had heard, but forgot WHERE I had heard them.
And in the process discovered libraries I never would have found otherwise. Great work! Keep it up!
We're always looking for new sounds to mangle, so when A Sound Effect had a holiday sale, I tried them out.
The purchase experience is really smooth and quick, and delivery is almost instant.
I'll definitely come back to them again in the future!
A Sound Effect is a wonderful resource for indie sound effects libraries. On top of that, it has some of the finest sound design, film and game audio interviews!
I often need very specific types of sounds so I've become a big supporter of independent recorders.
Until now I've always had to go to their individual websites. Now I can find them all in one place.
And, Asbjoern is great to work with!
A Sound Effect is a well curated boutique sound effects shop and a great place to find industry interviews and learning resources.