Audio sample libraries

Audio, General

• Many research datasets are also amazing artistic sample libraries, and they sometimes have favourable licensing and zero cost. For example, Nsynth.

• Freesound, the incredible collaborative sample/field recording community.

  See also freesound4s, the tagged and compressed 4-second subset

• FSI language courses are US-government-developed English↔︎[insert politically-sensitive language here] courses in the public domain.

  Free from any hint of modern pedagogical best-practice.

• Small but potent, Yellowstone Park Field Recordings, blogged here.

• Fact magazine’s freebie list.

• legowelt sample kits are a cult phenomenon from weird dutch guys who played a gig at my local cafe that one time.

• Alex Mcleans Dirt Samples are well-curated and come with a supercollider binding

• Fairlight CMI samples

• BBCSFX from the BBC

• Mihai Sorohan’s Trumpet packs

Whole songs

• Royalty Free Music by Bensound
• Free Music Archive; I think we must now use the archive.org backup of the audio.

See also some weird bonus options from the audio datasets.

Loops

• Beatstars is a commercial peer-to-peer beatmakers’ market which has lots of tracks without vocals. I’m not sure what analysis can be done upon them without paying the per-track licensing fee.
• Loopmasters
• Free music samples from SampleRadar

Drum samples

Who knows which of these are legal, but there is an endless churn of drum sample over on Reddit.

Instrumentals / acappellas / dub plates

Hard to google for because “instrumentals” has too many synonyms, and no one can agree how to spell “a capella” as a plural noun.

Here is a reddit on instrumentals, linking to more resources in this area.

acapellas.eu is a site for this kind of thing.

You should of course be careful about the copyright on these kinds of forum. I am not qualified to advise you on the legalities of up- or downloading in your jurisdiction, and I don’t mean to imply by linking to them that I have checked them out at all. They all claim to be abiding by relevant laws.

Soundfonts

A particular type of (faintly retro) sampled-based synthesis standard. Made famous by Fluidsynth, but there are other VST players and a big community.

You can also extract the samples form these and use them and normal one-shots.

• Synthfont maints lists of GM and orchestral SoundFonts and quirky soundfonts
• Musecore maintains a list of middle-brow soundfonts.
• Cymatics’ free soundffont list
• Trisamples Trap/EDM soundfonts

You can edited them with Viena, Swami or Polyphone.

Impulse Response libraries

Libraries of reverbs, that may be convolved with a signal to make it sound like it was recorded somewhere else — e.g. record a sound in a church then play back other sounds as if they were played in the church. Aside: there is an interesting deconvolution problem in making these things, and possibly an even more interesting one in synthesising them.

Sources, via, e.g. sidebrain:

• Teufelsberg radome impulse responses by Balance mastering.
• The Echo Thief — A professor at UCSD who travels the world and records real places
• EMES Virtual Rooms — Offer Free IRs on the bottom left of the screen
• Adventure Kid — Spring IRs
• Rekkerd Impulse Response Blog — Articles and posts about convolution sound design
• Fokke Van Saane — A lot of unique IRs. Make sure you download the Wav version of the packs.
• Lexicon 480L — IRs from the eponymous hardware reverb unit.
• Boss GT-8 — IR from another hardware unit
• SIR ships with some examples
• CKSDE — Separated IR Downloads
• dubbhism Stonerverbs
• Diego Stocco’s majestic mutant wierdverbs
• STN
• Samplicity
• OpenAIR (UK-based sampled IRs)
• freeverb lists some more
• Noisevault Studio and Convolution Forums
• CKSDE
• SYVERB
• Samplicity
• Voxengo Pristine Space
• Voxengo Free reverb
• Echochamber.ch
• echochamber’s impulse responses
• Violins
• Interruptor’s music — Club Simulation
• Prosoniq Impulse Reponse Download
• K7 Sounds
• signaltonoize.com Impulse Sets
• www.impulseresponse.org
• Auditorium Measurement
• Open Impulse Response Library
• Freesound IR

And ultimately anything can be treated as an impulse response; although you might have to do some fancy footwork to make it sound ok — see above re: deconvolution.

Managing and indexing

See sample management.