BBC Sound Effects

The BBC have released a veritable trove of free (for research/personal use) sound effects from their vast archives.

You can search for all manner of noises, from the clunk of trains being coupled in a goods yard, to the distant sound of crockery being moved in a restaurant back in 1974.

What’s particularly exciting, is how they’ve chosen to build this on top of the web platform, rather than go native. It effortlessly showcases what we can do with the web today, but it doesn’t feel remotely space age or bleeding edge; it’s just a really nice website. It runs on all browsers and devices I’ve tested on, and it’s fast and smooth.

Every sound has a deep link, the option to favourite and download. Waveforms update live as you play each track. And the best part of all? There’s a sound mixer where you can combine multiple sounds into a shareable link.

Tell you what, if you’re partial to the sounds of a peregrine falcon, combined with a church clock, combined with a baby rattle, have I got a mix for you.

You can mix each sound and even re-record & download that mix as a WAV file. All in the browser. It would be awesome if you could chop up the tracks or pop in configurable audio effects into the mix too, but that’s just me being greedy.

The Web Audio API is often seen as a side-project API, so it’s great to see it being used on a ‘genuine’ project.