For Want of a Sound Effect

I've been thinking recently about how I could improve the videos I make and one of the things I came up with (alongside “better editing in general”) was sound effects. Actually I've been looking for good sound effects off and on for over a year now; I've been using the site Freesound since last year, which houses a large collection of sounds that people have made available for free use under various open-source licenses (though the specifics of the license each sound uses may make it unavailable for commercial projects, or require attribution if you use it). Freesound has a decently large if occasionally eclectic collection, but it can be a bit hit-or-miss searching for specific sounds. It's also better for getting one or two specific sounds rather than a larger number of similar sounds that you can choose from.

I finally got motivated to search for alternate sources of sound effects last month, and eventually stumbled upon another website called A Sound Effect which is, in essence, an online marketplace for independent sound-effect artists to market their libraries of sound effects. It's quite professionally designed, and makes it easy to browse the hundreds of libraries it houses covering an astonishingly wide array of subjects. Every library comes with a demo reel to give you a taste of what's included, and I've found listening to them to be almost like aural candy; for some reason I find it incredibly satisfying listening to all these sounds broken down to their constituent parts. (Here are just a few I particularly enjoy; I also find myself paying a whole lot more attention to the various sounds in my environment after listening to a few of these!)

There's an end-of-the-year sale going on right now if any of you feel a sudden need to buy some sound effect libraries. I (sadly) don't have much use for most of these amazing sounds, but I've picked up a few smaller libraries for future use, and hope that this is a useful resource for anyone out there making videos or video games. A hui hou!