BBC Sound Effects - 16,000+ effects for personal, educational or research purposes

[Arthur]

Download

 

These 16,016 BBC Sound Effects are made available by the BBC in WAV format to download for use under the terms of the RemArc Licence. The Sound Effects are BBC copyright, but they may be used for personal, educational or research purposes, as detailed in the license.

 

Edited April 18, 2018 by Arthur

[Arthur]

To download all of the effects (in WSL, macOS or Linux)...

 

curl http://bbcsfx.acropolis.org.uk/assets/BBCSoundEffects.csv | grep -Eow "[0-9]+.wav" | xargs -I % curl -O http://bbcsfx.acropolis.org.uk/assets/%

 

Credit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16867863

[derf]

To download all of the effects (in WSL, macOS or Linux)...

 

curl http://bbcsfx.acropolis.org.uk/assets/BBCSoundEffects.csv | grep -Eow "[0-9]+.wav" | xargs -I % curl -O http://bbcsfx.acropolis.org.uk/assets/%

 

Credit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16867863

 

Grabbing it now, and a simple database and frontend for searching being developed

 

Thanks for the post!

[AMLinington]

Is it sad that my main reason for wanting to download these is to find a less annoying message alert tone? LOL

[fiza]

simple database and frontend for searching being developed

If you come up with something would you share with those of us less able in the programming front?

[derf]

If you come up with something would you share with those of us less able in the programming front?

 

Here's a sample PHP script to download the files one by one and convert to MP3 using ffmpeg. Not pretty, not nice, but didn't have the server space on my linux servers to download the lot in one go as was posted at the start of the thread. mp3 size @ 128 Kb/s is roughly 25 GB.

$csv = array_map('str_getcsv', file('BBCSoundEffects.csv'));
$first=true;
set_time_limit(0);
$nb_total=count($csv)-1;
$converted=0;
foreach ($csv as $c)
{
   if ($first)
   {
 $first=false;
 continue;
   }
   $file=$c[0];
   DoIt($file,$converted);
}
echo "Converted {$converted} of {$nb_total}";
return;

function DoIt($filename,&$converted)
{
   $mp3=str_replace('.wav','.mp3',$filename);
   $path='d:/your_location';
   if (file_exists("{$path}/{$mp3}"))
   {
 return;
   }
   $converted++;
   $temp = tempnam(sys_get_temp_dir(), 'TMP_');
   file_put_contents($temp, file_get_contents("http://bbcsfx.acropolis.org.uk/assets/{$filename}"));
   shell_exec("c:/temp/ffmpeg.exe -i {$temp} {$path}/{$mp3}");
   unlink($temp);
}

 

You'll need to give the PHP process around 1GB of RAM as some of the samples are quite large!

I just ran this on my desktop and waited a few days for it to finish. You can restart the script any time to continue downloading.