Quickly find the right royalty free music and sound effects for your project.
It can be hard to find just the right sound for your project. Endlessly searching through royalty free tracks, listening, searching some more. We hear you. That’s why we’ve painstakingly try to tag each one of our tracks and effects as accurately as possible. We want you to be able to find what you’re looking for easily and quickly. To this point, we’ve prepared this short guide on how to find your soundtrack fast and easy.
Begin your search for royalty free music
In the search area in our app on the top left, select either “music” or “sound effects”.
The “multi-layer only” option is mainly for music tracks. When we’ve recorded something in multi-layer, it means you’ll have full control over the volume of different elements in the track. You don’t want the guitar or horns, and you only want the percussion? No problem. Use a multi-layer track and pull down the volume of the guitar or horns.
Albums
A quick word about what makes a Smartsound album. We release new royalty free music albums every other week. The albums are united either by music style/genre or by theme. It’s often that you can find a few different music styles, or at least adjacent styles, on each album. Once you get familiar with the feel of a particular album, then it might be good to search by album – I actually prefer this myself, since the album art also helps represent the character of the album. However, searching by track might be the quicker way to find what you need. It’s easy to switch back and forth regardless, so making this a combination in your search can be helpful.
Finding Royalty Free Music
The app automatically opens to searching by Album, though you can change this using the horizontal menu on the top. “Selection” allows you to search by albums, playlists, and tracks. Then there are buttons to search only by those, and also by your marked favorites.
When you’ve settled on how you’re going to search for your royalty free music, now choose the tags you’re going to search by. To the left is the “Browse Music Filters” section, which highlights five different ways you can search, by: genre, attribute, production, instrument, and album. If you, for instance, need a soundtrack for a documentary, then go to “Production” and click on “Documentary”. If you need sports video music, then check out “Sports & Fitness”.
Tips
- You might see when you’re searching by track that the Album hyperlink is shown below the track title. Though not all albums have necessarily the same genres or moods, using the albums can be a way to come up with something unexpected and yet still fitting for your project.
- You’re not limited to a single genre either. Stack the tags in order to get a selection that’s more specific to your needs. Likewise, remove tags to broaden your search.
Finding Royalty Free Sound effects
While searching for sound effects, we’re left without the album/track distinction. Here Smartsound offers a search through 43000+ sound effects by looking through 34 categories on the left-hand side. The categories of these high-quality sound effects range from abstract and animal sounds, to foley and science fiction effects.
Sound effects not only include natural sounds like punches, clothes shuffles, and explosions, but they also include more musical effects and mood sounds, like whooshes, bell tolls, drones, and risers.
Tips
- Just like while searching for music, be sure to stack tags and get more precise searches
- While doing sound effects, it’s often best to layer sounds to get something more impactful and unique
- Sometimes unrelated sounds can be good for the effect your looking for: A car door slamming might sound like someone hitting a wall; or an explosion might sound like a superhero punching the bad guy. Use your imagination!
Be creative
Whatever you’re searching for, remember to keep and open mind and be creative. Sometimes narrowing your search can be just as bad as having too broad of a search. I’m confident though with our tags, you should be able to quickly find what you’re looking for. And if you can’t? Don’t hesitate to ask for some advice and maybe we can help point you in the right direction. So check out our app now and find the right royalty free music for you.
