Home Formats Universal Category System (UCS) Page 32
Sound effects libraries where the file names and metadata follow the Universal Category System (UCS), championed by renowned sound supervisor Tim Nielsen & more
In this library you will find recordings made by tracking a herd of wild Roosevelt Elk in the Pacific Northwest and recording them in the fall at the beginning of the “rut” when the males begin competing for attention of the females. Recording this library I quickly found that searching for a single target species to record is quite different than choosing a location and recording whatever happens to be there. New challenges were presented and a great deal of planning went into finding where the herd was likely to be at the time. With a brilliant stroke of luck all that planning paid off on the first attempt!
Included are 30 sounds of:
All the recordings were made in the same morning, meaning they can be plugged into the same game with a minimal amount of ambience matching. Note that although I made use of a parabolic mic during the recording, because these are wild animals I kept distance and hid behind a bush, staying out of sight of the elk so as not to disturb them. This introduces some extra “air” or ambience into the recording which I have chosen not to remove in order to preserve the integrity of the sound of the elk and to leave this option for you to decide.
I’ve already done the hard part of finding the elk and recording them for you, now you can focus on the creativity of your project.
Nature library is a collection of background ambiences covering lots of terrain from seas and lake shores, rivers, desert, grasslands, forests with birds, swamps, mountains and tropical areas all recorded in the North and Central Americas and Pacific Islands.
Eastern European Wetlands is our new sound effects library, made in collaboration with our friend and acclaimed field recordist Georgi Valchev from West Wolf Audio.
This outstanding collection of sound effects contains stunning ambient recordings from a variety of rural locations within Eastern Europe, such as Bulgaria and Romania. These real-world locations include wetlands, marshes, swamps, forests and city outskirts, and features a diverse line-up of wildlife local to each area.
Our team of audio craftsmen have edited and processed each sound with the upmost precision, so that you can drop your sounds straight into your project timeline and get down to work with minimal fuss.
All files in this library come at a sample rate of 24Bit 96kHz allowing for further sonic manipulation, and have been tagged with extensive UCS compliant metadata for ease of use.
Female Screams to enhance your projects, whether game or film!
Agonising screams, Fearful shrieks and aggressive battle cries
All Recorded in 24/192khz so they can be easily manipulated if needed
The First Industrial Revolution, which arised in the second half of the 18th century, meant a series of industrial and socioeconomical transformations and a turning point on sound: the end of silence.
Asturian sound editor and designer Oscar de Avila is the main recordist of this Library. He begins his career in the mid 90s as a music composer and sound editor for audiovisual media, carrying out numerous projects for several institutions and film production companies in the Principality of Asturias.
This large compilation of registers formed by forced sounds, dark and electrical textures and industrial-themed backgrounds have been registered in 2019 at the most important and strategic areas (they had difficult access and permits were hard to get) around some industrial locations in the Principality of Asturias,Spain, which is my home place, as I was working for a documentary website on Asturian industrial historic heritage as the only responsible for sound design and editing (patrimoniuindustrial.com).
All our libraries are UCS compliant (universalcategorysystem.com). In this new category system all files contain extensive metadata like file description, Category & Subcategory. Metadata can be read and processed by the most common audio libraries management tools . Starting with Full support from Soundminer and more audio tools adopting this system, we are adopting metadata UCS system in our files!
This library features ambience and crowd recordings captured inside Hong Kong shopping malls. Each recordings reflects a specific venue acoustics, crowd dynamics and perspectives. The primary language found in these recordings are Cantonese and Mandarin.
All recordings are recorded, edited and processed to broadcast standard , ready for all types of media use, such as animations, films, games, advertisements and other aspiring creative projects.
From the busy streets of Jakarta to the deep jungles of Borneo MWS Indonesian Ambiences is providing a diverse snapshot of Indonesia soundscape.
Carefully recorded over a 40 days trip it covers many islands of the Indonesian archipelago.
MWS Indonesian Ambiences includes urban scenes like squares, markets, small streets and avenue with bustling life and many calls to prayer singing through PAs. Suburban and villages scenes for quieter purposes, sea sides from near to desert Islands, a floating market and deep jungles ambiences at various time of the day.
The sounds are fully Meta-Tagged and are UCS compliant.
Born from our own adventures in crafting captivating ads, this library is a collection of sounds that brings “Champagne and Wine” commercials to life! Perfectly crafted for those exquisite slow-motion pack shots and the hyper-real sounds of liquid pours, this library is designed to elevate your projects with elegance and flair. Don’t miss the chance to speed up your production process while ensuring that every pop and pour resonates with your audience.
Cloth Rip 2: Household is a collection of over 500 ripping, tearing, and shredding sound effects. While the title is “Cloth Rip”, the materials range from common household cloths like curtains and towels to common household sheet-plastic, such as tarp and a heavy duty plastic garment bags used for storing clothes in a closet or attic. But wait! There’s more! In addition to the rip sounds, we have included some plastic movement sounds for both the tarp and garment bag.
Urban Underground consists of 111 files that will help you recreate the soundscape of an underground area in an urban environment. Quiet room tones, muffled noises, distant impacts, water through pipes, hums, buzzes, HVACs, fans, elevators and many more sounds are included.
Spatial Rain & Thunders is an immersive collection of audio ambiences for cinema, VR, videogames and any audiovisual or creative purposes.
The audios provided in this library are high quality recordings with Zoom H2n recorder in Spatial Audio mode, horizontal-only ambisonic alike mic layout stored in an AmbiX format. W, X, Y channels of AmbiX provide immersive audio through the horizontal plane and they allow to decode the recording into Mono, Stereo, Binaural, Quad, 5.0, 5.1, 7.1 and more layouts with dedicated Ambisonic processors. Z channel is empty.
The library comes with 5.0 and Stereo version of the AmbiX original recordings.
Now UCS Compliant!
Weather Bundle includes eight different sound libraries, featuring rain and wind both in urban and rural environments, at 30% discount.
This bundle brings together an incredible collection of rain and wind sounds hitting and blasting different surfaces at several intensities.
London 2020 captures the unique sound of the city throughout the Coronavirus pandemic, from March all the way through to December. It includes:
195 stereo files comprising over 10 hours of recordings, all made safely and according to the lockdown regulations in place at that time.
All recordings fully mastered and labelled (with metadata) using the Universal Category System.
A collection of RAW gritty metallic impacts, debris, movements and one shot recordings. Ideal for foley, and for sound designers and cinematic composers who wish to experiment with metallic sounds. Can also be used to design Horror UI sounds or metallic monsters in game audio.
WAV + MP3 files. UCS Compatible
This collaboration of the sound designers Bony Stoev and Saro Sahihi is the long awaited successor and main chapter of “Surrounding Horror – Prologue”.
In this library you’ll find all sounds from the “Surrounding Horror Soundscapes” library downmixed to Stereo.
Each soundscape was painstakingly handcrafted to 2:30 minute length with lots of frightening and terrifying sonic events.
It gives your horror-related production just the right amount of heart-stopping texture, leaving your audience with fear crawling up their spines to hold ’em tight.
Also available: “ANGST | Surrounding Horror – Construction Kit” (or get the Bundle)
This is Part 01 of the “GlitchFX Percussion Sounds 01” Sample collection It contains over hundreds of dirty, glitchy percussive sounds to spice up your tracks.
Noisy hats, dirty percussion sounds, devestated kicks and mutilated snare drums. Everything far from clean.
Fits perfectly for electronic music like GlitchHop, EDM, Trap, Dubstep, HipHop and many others. And of course for any kind of sound design.
The library ‘Montreal 365’ is the result of a long 5 years endeavour.
These sounds were recorded through 5 years of field recording around the city of Montreal, Canada.
It captures the wide variety of the urban facets and comprises all 4 seasons through which the soundscape is largely modified. The library has 2 main types of ambiences: interior and exterior.
Montreal is a large North-American cosmopolitan city with a European flavour. Many different ethnicities reside there. The main language is French but English is also omnipresent. The highly varied seasons mark the landscape and influence the moods and energy of the city.
Do you want to add a bit of mystery, depth, tension to your ambience stem and influence the emotional state of the listener?
Insectus is a special Ambisonics sfx library: we’ve been through lot of experimentation in that time with different approaches regarding the best way to deliver this bizarre package of sounds.
So what is it exactly? Just think about the sound-designed material as a background sweetener. We’ve called it Insectus not only for its Latin roots, but also because it comes from the fusion of two word: Insect+Tinnitus.
We used the higher octave of the spectrum in an odd way, mimicking insect vocalization and biophony sounds in Symbolic Sound Kyma by layering a lot of synthesised stream of small band of very high frequencies (hence the inspireful source name Tinnitus).
Now you can create soundscape by layering, rotating, expanding and shrinking the FuMa/ambiX file. You can also re-construct the 360° sound panorama from binaural up to 7.1 surround.
You’ll find 100 loopable variations of FOA FuMa/ambiX interleaved files (4 channels), with a duration of 30 seconds each.
Monster Library Vol. 5 – Visceral. Organic. Unleashed.
In Monster Library Vol. 5, we dive deep into the organic and visceral side of creature sound design. This volume features three unique monster types, with a total of 360 individual high-quality sounds, all recorded, edited, and mastered at 192 kHz / 24-bit for exceptional clarity and creative flexibility.
Meet the Monsters
– Kraughor is a towering beast with devastating roars and deep, rumbling frequencies that make it feel like a true threat.
– Varnok is a mid-sized, grotesque mutant. Its screams have evolved far beyond anything human, resulting in terrifying and unpredictable vocalizations.
– Skarnil is a small insectoid creature, sharp and fast, with a unique alien-like presence.
Each creature includes a full range of roars, growls, death sounds, and footsteps. As a bonus, we have also added egg hatching sounds and generic monster bites, ideal for enriching your creature scenes.
To create these monsters, we combined animal recordings from our existing sound library catalog with custom textures from our personal archive, including creaking furniture, rusted metal, slime layers, and more. The result is a rich and detailed collection ready to drop into your project.
Perfect for sound designers, game developers, and cinematic creators, this library offers drag-and-drop ease with high-end quality, designed to bring your creatures to life with impact and personality.
More about the pack
– Intuitive file naming
– All you’ll ever need regarding monster sounds [Use them again & again
– Use the sound effects over and over, in any of your projects or productions, forever without any additional fees or royalties. Use the SFX in your game, in your trailer, in a Kickstarter campaign, wherever you need to, as much as you want to.
– Totally mono compatibility
– All sounds have several variations.
– Use your imagination and feel free to use any sound for a creature other than the one described, remember that the world of sound is totally subjective.
– For any questions or problems: [email protected]
Pipe Noise & Flow is a sound effects library built around the hidden voices of pipe systems, large and small. Captured over several years across industrial plants, residential buildings, factories, sewers, underground tunnels, caves and public infrastructure, this collection brings together a wide range of sonically rich material.
You’ll hear water, gas, and air moving through pipes made of metal steel, copper, aluminium, plastic, glass, concrete, and stone. There are massive flows and subtle trickles, bursts of pressure, hollow resonances, eerie whistles, and the strange tonalities that emerge when systems crack, leak, or fail. Many recordings feature broken or deteriorating pipes, full of texture and unpredictability. While there is plenty of industrial and subterranean grit, you’ll also find more subtle sources like kitchen sinks, bathroom plumbing, and everyday interior systems; sounds that can lend realism or eeriness to intimate scenes.
This library is designed to be flexible and inspiring. Use it to create detailed ambiences for sci-fi, horror, and post-apocalyptic settings, to build layered mechanical textures for machines and user interfaces, or to design unique elements for hybrid weapons, alien devices, strange creatures or abandoned environments. Whether you need the realism of urban infrastructure or the surreal qualities of a forgotten machine, Pipe Noise & Flow offers an unexpected toolkit full of possibility.
Aged Truck features a variety of characteristic sounds from an old classic truck. From idling engines to acceleration and deceleration, as well as different perspectives of steady and casual driving, this sound library strives to capture the essence of classic trucking. It also includes detailed recordings of doors, gear sticks, pedals, and various levers and switches. Hear the metallic clatter of shifting gears during a drive, and the abrupt halt of an engine stalling mid-motion.
This library includes total 100 files, consisting of 65 mono files and 35 stereo files recorded in ORTF at 96 kHz. Approx. 1 hour and 29 minutes total.
Certainly, this library was carefully tagged with rich Soundminer metadata, including marks in the recordings highlighting interesting sounds.
All the recordings were recorded, edited and mastered with love and care.
Experience the distinctive call of the Laughing Kookaburra with this meticulously crafted sound library, offering 30 high-quality audio tracks, each with multiple variations to suit the needs of any project.
Organized for seamless use
Recordings are uniformly labeled to ensure effortless integration into your workflow, allowing for easy selection, combination, or swapping of takes based on your creative vision.
Accurate recording with professional equipment
Captured at an intimate distance of just 20cm, these recordings deliver unparalleled clarity and detail.
Equipment used is as follows:
– Sennheiser MKH 8050: For direct, natural sound capture.
– Sanken CO-100K: Ideal for capturing ultrasonic frequencies.
– Zoom F6: Professional audio recorder that allows recording at 192Khz.
– Zoom H6: For capturing a stereo recording.
Ultrasonic capture ensures that even when sounds are pitched down, their depth and frequency richness is preserved, making them perfect for designing fantastical creatures or unique soundscapes.
Professional Standards & Quality
– Resolution: Recorded at 24-bit/192kHz and delivered at 96kHz/24-bit.
– Editing: Tracks have been carefully cleaned of external noises such as distant birds, wind, footsteps or human activity, ensuring a pristine, professional-quality product ready for immediate use.
With The Animal Symphony: Laughing Kookaburra, you’ll have access to a versatile, perfect for enhancing any audiovisual project or creative endeavour.
Ideal applications:
– Video games: Add realism and depth to the natural environments of your games.
– Cinema and Documentaries: Enrichment of the audiovisual product with authentic sounds.
– Educational Applications: Use these sounds in educational projects to teach about wildlife and animal behavior.
– Multimedia Projects: Ideal for any project that seeks to enrich the user’s listening experience.
Technical details:
– Total audios: 30 (544 aprox Individually)
– Format: 192kHz – 96kHz/24bit
– Equipment used: Zoom F6 recorder with Sennheiser MKH 8050 microphone and Sanken CO-100K microphone, as well as a Zoom H6 recorder for stereo.
– Duration: 04:44
Friction Mallet_Pack 01 is a pack of friction and impact recordings using a Unlimited Soundpoet Silicone Rubber Friction Mallet against a Long Cardboard Box. Recorded with microphones directly pointing inside the opening of the 58 inch x 12 inch x 7 inch box. The long box size gives us a wide range of recording times, from less 1 second, to around 15 seconds!
Using this Egg Shaped Friction Mallet gets you a fun combination of Groans, Tonal Rumbles, Vibrates, Impact, Bounces, Tight and Loose Slides, Swipes, and wild Pitch Bends.
Packed in at 3.9GB, 838 single triggered sounds totaling around 40 minutes to use as a creature, sound design, vehicle layer or any other layer you can think of! (Or maybe farts?)
These sound files were recorded at 32bit, 192kHz using the Sennheiser MKH8050, Sennheiser MKH30 and Sanken CO-100K microphones into a Sound Devices Mix Pre-10ii.
All are metadata tagged using the Universal Category System in Soundminer, and also searchable in Soundly, and Basehead.
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.