Animal Sounds Libraries

Question

Does anyone know any CD recordings or royalty-free sites that contain quality animal sounds of various types? (ie: North American, African, Asian, Australian animal sounds).

The key to this question is quality sounds. I have found several sites but the recording quality is rather poor. One site I found has well-recorded animal sounds but is for personal use only and not commercial.

Thanks

Carmine

Answer 1

The smaller libraries tend to be very good.

• Tim Prebble's seals - http://hissandaroar.com/sd003-seal-vocals/
• Chuck Russom's dogs - http://chuckrussomfx.com/store/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=1&products_id=4
• Frank Bry's pigs and insects - http://www.therecordist.com/soundbox-sfx/soundbox-hd/animals-hd
• Boom Library's wildcats - http://www.boomlibrary.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=48

I also hear that Rob Nokes has tons of excellent horse recordings.

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FWIW animals are tricky in the way that vehicles are tricky.

• access can be difficult/expensive
• recording environments can be challenging because they often must be done outdoors
• they tend to be very expressive, so its difficult to get full and complete coverage for library purposes
• there are thousands of unique species and breeds and makes and models
• there are subcultures of people out there that specialize in one specific animal/vehicle type and they will call you out if things don't sound right.

For these and other reasons it's difficult for libraries to really get excellent sounding coverage over a variety of species in a cost-effective and marketable manner. The end result is that (with the exception of the few libraries listed above) if you're looking for good sounding generic stuff that doesn't go deep into coverage you're probably going to be ok, but the moment you need something even a little specialized you're probably going to need to source and record those elements yourself.

Answer 2

Hollywood Edge recently released Animal Planet Sounds

Recently released, as in, within the last 6 months or so... so it's bound to be pretty fresh versus the canned PE series (which is good too, but so overused).

Answer 3

Not sure if it is the type of animal you are looking for but I just put up a new post on my blog, about recording aggressive Arctic Terns in northern Iceland, with a link to download a collection of 30 files of the birds Caws and screams. The files have metadata embedded in them already and you can go to town with them on whatever project you like. Check it out: http://www.azimuthaudio.ca/azimuth-blog/2011/6/1/arctic-terns-attack.html

There are also some cool cat sounds you can pulldown from soundcloud on this page of my site: http://www.azimuthaudio.ca/azimuth-blog/2011/5/11/cringer-the-cat-attack.html