Looking for great sound effects and music to improve the audio for your next film projects?
I use a large number of different free and paid music and sound packs for my own tutorials and short films and in this video I discuss where you can find them!

Best Free Music and Sound Effects

If you don’t have any money to spend on sound packs, there are a large number of great resources available where you can find free music and free sound effects. Here is a list of my favourite places for free audio:

• Freesound – Make sure you filter down to the audio that is under the ‘Creative Commons 0’ license
• Incompetech – A large amount of great free music. Make sure you credit Kevin McLeoud appropriately if you use this audio
• Machinimasound – Lots of great music pieces. Pay attention to the license of the audio you are using
• YouTube Music Library – Plenty of good music, all free to use
• YouTube Sound Effect Library – Plenty of good sound effects, all free to use

Do make sure that you understand the license for any audio you download off the internet. Some free resources require you to attribute the creator in your video or leave the original audio unmodified. Personally I look for files that are under the ‘Creative Commons 0’ lisense as it requires no attribution and I can modify and use the files in any way I see fit, even for commercial purposes.

Best Paid Music and Sound Effects

In combination with my own audio recordings and the free resources above, I do use quite a number of different paid sound packs.
With so many choices to get free music and free sound effects you may be wondering why pay for your audio in the first place?
Here are 4 reasons why I personally often prefer the paid audio packs:

1. Sound Quality

Professionally crafted film scores and sound effects usually sound much bigger and better than the audio that people make available online for free. Now you can find some great sounding free audio online as well, but overall, I feel I get a bigger and better sound using professionally created music and sounds.

2. Accessibility

Searching through free resources online can be very, very time consuming. Having a few dedicated film score and sound effect packs at your disposal makes this process much faster and for me, being always short on time, that’s definitely worth the money.

3. Copyright

It can be hard to prove that you have the right to use some music or some audio file you downloaded for free from some website that may no longer even exist. By purchasing your music and your sound effects you get a receipt and a license with your name that you can use to easily prove without doubt that you have the legal rights to use these sounds.

4. Price

A lot of great paid sound and music packs available are now well within the affordable range for low budget film makers like myself and there are some really great options out there that I highly recommend you check out.

My Personal Picks

These are the paid sound packs I own and I really enjoy using all of them to build the best possible audio tracks for my projects.
I recommend you have a look at these options to determine for yourself whether you think they are worth your money:

• Video Copilot – Pro Scores – Probably THE music pack to get if you want to create dark, horror or action movies
• Video Copilot – Designer Sound FX – Full of massive hits and dark sounds, a great addition to Pro Scores
• Audio Elite Royalty Free Music Pack – Contains over 250 great sounding, royalty free songs for a pretty affordable price
• Film Riot – Lord of War Gun Sound Effects – The only gun sound effects pack you’ll ever need. Tons of guns, large range of shot and foley sounds
• Film Riot – Fighting SFX – Great physical fight sounds like punches, kicks, object hits, body slams, gore effects and more
• Film Riot – Cinema Crunch Cinematic Scores – Cinematic horror, thriller and action scores

The Ring – Halloween Horror Special

Here is an example of one of my projects, using a mix of audio I recorded myself, free resources (mainly Freesound) and paid music packs. The two paid packs I mainly used were Pro Scores and Designer Sound FX from Video Copilot and during the credits you can hear one of the great dramatic tracks from the Audio Elite sound pack.

Enjoy!