We can all repeat the mantra that sound is as important as the visual elements in a video production, but I think even that underestimates the sheer weight of sound in a movie. Light sabers, gun shots and punches are one thing, but the literal and suggested subliminal story told by sound in a movie can often be more important than the visuals. In fact, sound can tell stories that cannot be seen, sometimes more graphically than if we had witnessed it with our own eyes. When you see an actor's arm being broken in a fight, you know it's fake, but when you hear the crunch of splintering bone, you can't help but wince in sympathetic pain.

Building a sound effects library for use in your projects used to be a fairly expensive proposition, but the rise of relatively inexpensive digital recorders has led to an explosion in availability of cheap and even entirely free effects, most notably from the community of producers and users at Soundsnap. 

While "free" might be the first thing that attracts you to Soundsnap, the site also has the added advantage of being accessible on-demand. There's really no need to buy a sound effects library with thousands or tens of thousands of clips you'll never use and storing those on your hard drive when you can just grab what you need, when you need it.

Quality, Quantity and Free?!

Soundsnap is my first-stop when looking for effects, with +30,000 sounds and another 20,000 musical elements (loops). And it's all entirely free. Sounds too good to be true, I know, but after you signup with a free Soundsnap account, you get "...a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, perpetual license... to use, reproduce, distribute..." all of the sounds you find. Yea, there's a lot of crap, but there's a lot of really excellent quality media.

Search

Type in a search term (like "crowd " or "applause ") and in a second or two, the site returns hundreds of clips. Click the Play button and - after a one-second buffer - you get a preview of the clip. Pay attention to the User names and you will very rapidly start to recognize who is most likely to submit quality clips and who is likely to have uploaded crap. For example the user "rebecca" has been amazingly prolific with 2,200 submissions so far, many of them top notch. You can sort by popularity or rating, but rating is not really very useful. Most clips are available in MP3 and WAV formats, most at digital CD quality or better. 

Community

The Soundsnap site is also a community of sound engineers, professional, wannabe professional, amateur and talented hobbyists that record audio just for the sheer joy of it. Sure, there are hacks that don't know what they are doing, but overall, the quality is remarkable. Better still, the Community that interacts in the Forums is very energetic and responsive, even if it's still pretty small. So if you need a sound of a Chinese night market, post a request in the forums and see what turns up.

Did you visit and bookmark the Soundsnap site yet? Well, what are you waiting for?

{mxc}