Happy 21st Birthday to Our Big Sister

Every family has an older sibling, and BigSoundBank is no exception. Ours is French, and her name is LaSonotheque. In November 2005, she started out as a tiny page at an address nobody remembers anymore: sonotheque.slnb.free.fr. A handful of sounds, a simple and slightly stubborn idea: offer good quality sound effects and ambiences, for free, to everyone. This month, LaSonotheque turns 21, and above all, it's a great excuse to say thank you.

From a personal page to a real name

Three months after launch, in February 2006, I bought the LaSonotheque.org domain name. That year, 167 sounds joined the collection. Then the years flew by, with some very busy stretches and some quieter ones: 2017 brought no new sounds at all, while 2020 welcomed 590, a record. Today, the catalog holds 3,608 files, or 33 hours, 1 minute, and 4 seconds of audio to listen to, download, and reshape.

These sounds are free and royalty-free, released under a CC0 license, for any project, commercial or not, anywhere in the world. Most are recorded at 48 kHz / 16-bit and left raw, with no effects or mixing, so everyone can make them their own.

And then came the little sister

In January 2013, LaSonotheque got a younger sibling: BigSoundBank, the site you're reading right now, built to carry the same mission in English. When it launched, I introduced it in a short post called New Site BigSoundBank.com. Same sounds, same spirit, same free license, just a wider audience.

Over the years, the big sister kept growing. The blog and in-depth articles arrived in 2018, the sound quiz and the shop in 2020, UCS compatibility in 2021. 2022 was a busy year, with the opening of the Museum of Disappeared Sounds, the first pages of my comic 1,65 µHz, live streams, and a podcast. Then came the Exposi'Son and Ambi'Son sound modules, a card game about sound careers, the first sound advent calendar, and La Fabric'à'Sons, a shared workshop space. Twenty-one years in, the adventure keeps going.

You, most of all

The best number is yours: about 220,000 visitors a month and nearly 150,000 downloads a month on LaSonotheque, sounds that end up in films, games, podcasts, live shows, and classrooms.

LaSonotheque and BigSoundBank are still volunteer projects, run by one person, and they take a lot of time and money. Revenue no longer covers the costs. So if these sites are useful to you, a donation, a free account, or a small purchase in the shop really helps blow out the next candles.

A big thank you to everyone who listens to, uses, and shares these sounds, in French, in English, and everywhere in between.

How long have you been using BigSoundBank, and do you remember the very first sound you downloaded here?