The Freesound Project
If you're like me, you love to mess around with sound. Being an aspiring producer I'm always looking for that perfect sound blip. Propellerheads Reason pulls me in, spending hours toying with bleeps and analogue whirs.
Today I found a great resource for such projects. It's called The Freesound Project. Their goal is to provide sound samples (.wav, .mp3, .aif) of natural and unnatural sounds. Hundreds of members are recording everything in life and posting what they snag on The Freesound Project website. I imagine microphones being placed next to random things to capture that obscure sound.
Every sound is tagged (and geotagged) so when you're looking for "telephones", you get all of the samples with that tag. The Freesound Project community has competitions, sponsored by various companies such as iZotope
The sound files are downloadable, protected by Creative Commons so that these sounds will remain free. This site is perfect for anyone looking for sound samples, whether you're creating loops, a low budget film, an e-card, etc. Packages of sounds (sample packs) are available for download, as well as individual samples. Pull them into Reason