Websites for Free Sound Effects, Loops and Music

Improve Presentations with Free MP3 and WAV Audio Downloads

Adding background music or sound effects to your presentations increases viewer engagement. It also contributes to message understanding and retention by setting the mood and drawing attention to key points. If you're developing a presentation for school or personal use, there are a vast number of online resources that provide free-to-use loops, clips and tracks. Commercial developers will need to review the usage guidelines carefully before using any of the free offerings on the following websites.

Sound Effects
Sound effects can help you bring your animations and videos to life. People expect to hear a certain sound when they see rain falling or a train whiz by. You can also create an audio cue for key points so that, when your viewer hears the cue, he or she will (even subconsciously) perk up and pay attention. Here are some websites where you can find sound effects for animals, people, household items, vehicles and other things:

• A Zillion Sounds 2.0 offers about 5,000 clips in MP3 format. If you have the Shockwave player installed on your computer, you can preview each file through your browser.
  
• AudioMicro offers about 2,000 free sound effect clips in WAV format. There are tens of thousands of more available for sale by subscription or single-file purchase.
  
• FlashKit, a website mostly dedicated to Flash development, offers more than 5,000 free sound effects among its resource offerings.
  
• Public Domain Sounds offers hundreds of free sounds for personal or commercial use.
  
• Sound Bible provides both free and for-purchase audio files in both WAV and MP3 formats. Some files are free even for commercial use.
  
• SoundByter is a blog that posts a free sound effect every day with an archive of effects, vocals and music loops.
  
• Freesound.org offers a searchable database of sound effects along with music loops, vocals and other audio files.
  
• SoundJay offers sound effects, loops and music tracks in both WAV and MP3 formats.
  

Music
Adding introductory or background music to your presentations can set and control your viewers' moods. Elicit fear with spooky music or calm with some classical strings. Excite them with upbeat tempos. Here are some websites offering quality background music tracks and loops:

• Freeplay Music is one of the highest quality music providers currently on the Web. They offer more than 15,000 songs in varying lengths.
  
• Looperman offers thousands of free music loops and vocal clips along with full-length tracks.
  
• Partners In Rhyme offers royalty-free WAV music loops for personal or commercial use, even providing an authorization form for you to use.
  
• If you subscribe to the Play In Music newsletter, you'll get access to its archive of music loops. They claim to post 20 new loops every month. Offerings include individual instrument loops and songs created with those loops.
  
• Free Music Archive offers downloadable MP3s of music in a variety of genres under varying licenses.
  

Miscellaneous Audio
Perhaps you need a clip from a famous speech or television program; you can turn to one of these websites for free files:

• The Internet Archive's Audio database offers millions of audio clips for audiobooks, poetry, music, news, podcasts and public safety radio dispatches.
  
• Move Sounds Central provides hundreds of MP3 and WAV clips of movie quotes and dialog clips from classic and modern film.
  
• WavSource.com offers free WAV clips from movies, famous people, and television, in addition to miscellaneous sound effects.
  

 

eLearning Design and Development: 5 Tips for Getting Started Now With Virtual Training

Whatever your reason for joining the digital learning era, you are here and you need to get started fast. As a virtual learning professional with almost two decades of experience, I would never recommend skipping the good books (see list at the end of this article), networking with experienced instructional designers, or obtaining a formal education. All the same, I understand your need to get going right now with your first learning project. Here are some basic tips for creating effective learning programs.

Don't Skip the Assessment It might seem like you can shave off some project time by skipping the assessment phase, but I guarantee you will learn the hard way how much time you'll waste not doing it. The important considerations, such as audience, technology and learning goals, are part of the assessment phase of any learning project. Without defining who your audience is, what experiences they bring, their current job and technical skill levels, and what technology they have available to access your learning, you will fall short of your goals. Define the main learning objectives and stick to them. In the end, you want to know and be able to align your learner, goals and content.

Don't Skip the Design Phase Good design provides intuitive access to the information you want your learners to have. It includes branding, user interaction and content flow. Think about the last website you visited. What caught your eye? How easy was it to find what you were looking for? If your design doesn't focus them on the Start line and guide them through the content, you can fall short of your training goals.

During the design phase, you should define all elements that should be on the computer screen and what happens when the learner interacts with those elements. Create wireframes to specify each type of page or interface in your course. For example, you may have a tabbed learning site that provides access to a syllabus, weekly video and document resources, a forum for student-led discussions and an form for submitting assignments. Also, storyboard your multimedia presentations, including mock-ups of key scenes.

Give It a Personal Touch In order for your elearning to succeed, you need to connect with your learners on an emotional level. You'll want to personalize your content to draw learners in and connect them to the content. This is where your assessments come into play. After all, you need to know what makes your learners tick before you can emotionally connect them to your content. By understanding your learners' past experiences and existing knowledge, you can use the best analogies, anecdotes and other tools to aid in message retention.

Keep It Simple In all respects, simplify; this includes your design and content. A page with too many videos, documents, and external links may overwhelm learners. Likewise, presentations with too much information can result in cognitive overload, which means your learners won't be able to process and store the information into long-term memory. As a general rule, keep interfaces and design concepts to three or fewer colors and fonts. Too many formatting changes are distracting and make it difficult for learners to distinguish important elements such as headers, graphic captions and key points.

Chunk It Up
Keep your presentations brief. Most educators agree that the adult attention span averages only about 15-20 minutes (read here, here and here ). Ideally, keep your presentations to no more than 5-10 minutes covering no more than three important main points. Also, give the learner an opportunity to pause every 2-3 minutes, either through manual navigation, a quiz questions or another interactivity. This gives the learner time to digest and reinforce the information you provide before moving on. By chunking larger presentations into multiple smaller modules also makes it easier for the learner to relocate important information should they need to revisit a topic.
Good luck with your new elearning project. Be sure to read the following texts for more detailed information about instructional design and virtual learning development.

Reading Recommendations to Get You Started

• "e-Learning and the Science of Instructions: Proven Guidelines or Consumers and Designers of Multimedia Learning" by Ruth C. Clark and Richard Mayer
  
• "Rapid Instructional Design: Learning ID Fast and Right" by George M. Piskurich
  
• Any of the ASTD books, including "Training Design Basics," "Needs Assessment Basics" and "Virtual Training Basics."
  
• "e-Learning by Design" by William Horton