FreeSound Hosted on ZooomrIt’s a good thing I’m not a paid blogger because I do terrible with deadlines. Once again, this week’s site of the week is a little bit late in coming out. Rather then try and bombard you with all the sites I need to get caught up on, I think I’m just going to make the site of the week less structured and will sneak in the few I’m missing at irregular intervals throughout the year.
This week’s belated winner was The Free Sound Project. Free sound is a great site, where it’s users can upload sound effects and then allow others to use the effects under various creative commons licenses.
Lately, I’ve been getting more and more involved in video and one of the things that is a huge pain in the neck is having to track down sound effects that you want to use in various clips. There are a number of paid services where you can pay royalties to use their content, but most of the services look pretty spammy and I’ve got a suspicion that these sites are very trustworthy and are using a little blackhat SEO magic to get to the top of Google’s search results.
When it comes creating videos, I’m anything but a pro, so the prospect of paying someone, just so that 10 of my friends can watch a vacation video, isn’t really all that appealing. At the same time though, it can be really frustrating to want a certain sound, but not be able to locate one for free. That is where the Free Sound project steps in. With most of the clips that are uploaded to the site, all you need to do is give attribution to the individual who originally recorded it and you can mix, mash and burn to your heart’s content.
What’s really nice about the site is that because they have such a diverse community, you’ll find all kinds of neat effects that would be harder to find on the more focused paid services. It’s also very easy for users to contribute sounds to the site. Unlike stock video footage or even photographs of newsworthy events, you don’t have to be in the right place at the right time to get an effect that someone might be interested. You don’t even need expensive equipment, you just need a sound recorder and a healthy interest to classify and upload various noises that you come across during your day.
Of all the features that our included on the site, I had the most fund playing with their random sound button. Given how many sound clips that they have, you never know what to expect and it’s a good way to find new sounds for videos, that you wouldn’t have thought of using otherwise.
Congratulations to the Free Sound Project for winning this weekend’s week’s week and half’s site of the week. The nominations for next week’s site of the week are listed below. You can vote in the sidebar. If you’d like to nominate a site for consideration, send me an email at Davis (at) DavisFreeberg.com and I will add it to the list of nominees.