I’m hoping to get some digital storytelling tasks off the ground again this term at my school. There are a few literature circles taking off for differing year levels so things look hopeful. One of them involves my English class so there’s a definite goer!
I’ve just discovered Soungle. This is a site that enables you to search for royalty free sound effects that you can use for projects. Great for digital stories. One of the best digital stories students of mine made used a telephone ring tone and a bomb blast to great effect. Here’s what they say on their about page;
Soungle is a free site, developed by Southern Codes, for finding all kind of sound FX and musical instruments samples on our mega online library. As different from most of similar sites, Soungle is NOT a Web search engine. It only searches in our growing monster database. Our goals are to keep it simple to use (search, preview and download) and to keep it free.
Keyword searches are performed by entering any word or phrase in a search box. The retrieved results of a keyword search are displayed ten to a page. Clicking on play icon allows you to preview a file. Download button instantly downloads the sound effect or musical instrument sample file. A short description of the sound appears on top of every sound , followed by the frame rate, duration and bit rate. Remember, all of our sound effects and samples are royalty free for downloading.
A great site to share with kids to teach them about using media without breaking copyright conventions. As I venture more heavily into a connected world I’m more interested in getting my students to post content publicly. To do that, they will have to ensure that they are using images, music and sounds that are copyright free. Makes the task more difficult but the wider audience they can attract to their creative efforts should be appealing for them and may provide them with the intrinsic motivation to get the task done right. We shall see, we shall see…
Lucacept - intercepting the Web 
Jenny, thanks for the recommendation. It is already very useful for me. Best regards,
Alan T.
Jenny, Thanks so much for the resource. I’ve added it to my fav’s.
Thanks
Soungle looks great but I can’t download the sounds. When I click download it plays the sound again in a new quicktime window. If I right-click on download I just get a flash menu. D0 you know where I’m going wrong?
Steve
Thanks Jenny for your comment on my post…about your statements! I have been reading your blog for a while & have gleaned many insights from your recommendations. Lucacept is on my blogroll as one of the blogs I regularly like to keep up with. Thanks for sharing the great work that you do!
@Steve- I get the same behavior, but once the file opens in it’s own window I am able to save the file with any file name I give it. A little clunky but it works. There’s probably a better way I don’t know about.
Thanks for the comments everyone. @Steve and @Bill – I’ve emailed Alan who created the site to see if he can provide an answer to how the files can be saved – I’ll post an answer if I receive one. I have had problems too. Been so busy this week haven’t had time to get back to the blog -that’s what starting a new term does to you!!
Jenny.
Has anyone figured out how to download the sounds yet? I’m trying to figure this out and it’s really frustrating me. Help please! 🙂
Jilly
I’ve tried to contact Alan Tumulty who put the site together but his email keeps bouncing back! Not a good sign. If I get any further I’ll post a comment to let you know.
Jenny.
I had no problems with downloading sounds, if you Jenny, feel free to contact me.