Yep, it's true! The brave people at BBC made their vast sound FX archive accessible to the public last year, giving away hundreds, or more like even thousands of hours of free audio material.

It's not exactly a hot sensation as it actually happened a few months ago, but still - did you know? I didn't! And it's like heaven on earth for all the producers looking for some sound effects to use in their music. 

The library feels almost endless with so many various effects that you can get lost in them quite easily. Even the A-Z sorted category list is longer than you would imagine, and there is basically everything - sounds of cars, bicycles, trains, trams, buses, boats, airplanes, tractors, bulldozers or even tanks, also various animals, people doing things (talking, eating, drinking, doing sports), a whole universe of ambiance recordings - parks, shops, factories, beaches, gyms, bars, coffee places, restaurants, streets, museums, hotels, hospitals, farms, fields, rivers... 

And those are just those normal-sounding categories - what about "acetylene torches", "acid blobs" or "orgies"? The only letdown for me was "farts" category missing :)) But apart of that, it feels like there's every sound on earth. So go ahead and explore - I'm sure you will find some interesting audio material to spice up your beats with! 

Just keep in mind there are actually not royalty-free samples (as BBC also offers paid licensing deals for the whole collection), but as far as I am concerned, nobody will probably take your beat down off your distro because you used a chirping birds sample from BBC's database in it (as I guess it would be quite hard to even detect it in the whole mixdown).

Also, if you're interested in some out of this earth sounds, you should definitely check out the NASA sound archive I mentioned on the blog earlier.