16,000 professional BBC sound effects for your productions

In a simulation or video scene, sound adds emotion and realism to what you are trying to show. But it's not always easy to record the sounds that actually occur when, for example, lab objects are manipulated or items are moved.

Sound Effects, a free service from the BBC, offers a bank of more than 16,000 quality recordings of sounds from everyday life or from the past, from a passing train to a slamming door to a 1960s telephone to a living room dog. The murmur of a crowd, the sound of wind in the leaves, footsteps in the snow, a spoon in a cup... thousands of sounds are waiting to enrich your productions.

Better yet, the site offers a mixing studio where you can layer multiple sounds and calibrate their intensity and edit them to achieve a unique ambience, depending on the needs of the scene.

For example, this ambience created in 3 minutes, combines an outdoor scene, terrace conversations and a ringing telephone.

As you record the mix, you can download it as a .wav file. You can also download each file as an mp3 and mix them locally.

The sounds are grouped into 23 categories and it is possible to use the search engine to locate them, with a little imagination. Naming what you hear is really not an exact science.

The use is free for non-commercial use. Otherwise, permission is required, including from educational institutions. Most of the time it will be at no cost.

Sound Effects - BBC

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