20 GB Of FREE Sound Effects Released By SONNISS

For the third year in a row, the sound design company SONNISS is giving away a substantial amount of free SFX material in celebration of the annual Game Developer’s Conference (currently being held in San Francisco, California). The latest release is called #Game Audio GDC Bundle Part 3 and contains 20 GB worth of premium quality sound effects.

The library of over 20 GB of effects tailored towards video game developers is available for download via Dropbox, Torrent, Google Drive, and direct links as well. This is the largest free sample pack I’ve seen, containing 830 sound effects in total – some as a short as a single footstep and others being extended background noise tracks that set the scene.

The sheer amount of variety on offer here is staggering, but I wish the labeling on some of the included files was a little bit clearer. Filenames such as EDUcon_B3.wav don’t really clue us in to what we’re about to hear. Thankfully, the majority of the included sounds come with more descriptive labels, so these negative examples are more of an exception.

The included files are organized into folders such as “Sci-Fi Weapons” and “Creaks & Squeaks” but also titled by the name of the sample pack they originated from. Suffice to say there are a lot of folders to shuffle through in order to find what you’re looking for. Searching by text is probably a better method.

All of the included samples are 100% royalty-free for personal or commercial use, and no attribution is needed. The only stipulation is that you do not sell any of these samples “as they come”, which is a standard rule in sample and stock music licensing. It appears that SONNISS does not keep promotional free libraries on their site forever (although you can still grab their amazing freebie released last year), so if you could use more sound effects, I would check this out sooner than later.

#Game Audio GDC Bundle Part 3 is available for free download via SONNISS (14.8 GB download size, ZIP archive, contains 830 sound effects in 24-bit WAV format).