BBC Sound Effects Library – Free

I was recently interested in the announcement of the release of the BBC sound effects library like many other sound people. It’s dated but it is a sizable library of well trodden sound for design and education. You can traverse the library using their website but I wanted to scrape the entire library so I could search it with my own metadata explorers like Soundminer and Mediabay.

This lead me to the well crafted script linked here: https://github.com/FThompson/BBCSoundDownloader

This is better than the simple script I was thinking of. First of all the above script is multithreaded and will download ten files at a time. It tracks it’s success and counts files and reports which file is being worked on. I believe it increments past the last known successful download and can continue from there. It’s pretty nice and shouldn’t be too hard on the servers. These files all have to be licensed for commercial use so please plan accordingly. It never hurts to be able to browse. If you have a period piece documentary, these archives could be useful.

Perhaps even better is below the script was a tagged magnet link, so you can give the BBC servers a break. P2P link below
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:277UI76DIYAAPS2LQC3R3XF4PXCS5X5H&dn=BBCSoundEffectsComplete

Check it out for yourself.