Rain Sound Effects is a free thunderstorm sound library featuring 64 royalty-free rain and thunder sounds.
The free download link is located at the end of this article.
Free Rain Sounds
I recorded these free rain sound effects during a spring storm on the streets of Belgrade. The sounds were captured using a portable Edirol R-09 stereo audio recorder.
The library contains all the rain and thunder sound effects you may need to evoke the atmosphere of a rainy day in a large city. You can hear the cars passing by on some of the recordings, tires splashing through puddles, and people walking around in a hurry.
The rest of the audio content was recorded in quieter parts of the city, far from the busy downtown. These are perfect for use as sleep sounds or a rain background in video projects and game development.
I also recorded the beautiful sound of raindrops falling on an umbrella. The subtle sound of rain dropping on the surface of an umbrella is almost like vinyl noise.
There are also around twenty recordings of distant thunder rumble. These can be mixed with clean recordings of rain if you need background noise for a movie or an audio project.
The coolest sounds in this library are the samples of seven extremely loud thunders that struck very close, even too close if you ask me. Those are the most valuable samples in the pack because recording a storm from such a close distance is indeed a very rare opportunity.
The funny thing is that I got a bit scared at one moment, so I turned off the recorder and took shelter inside a building.
This is something I regret from today’s perspective.
There would have been around five or six more fantastic thunder strike samples if I kept recording that time. Still, at that moment, I was pretty sure that staying outside would be too dangerous, so I played it safe.
Play the last sample in the “Heavy Thunder” folder at a loud volume, and you’ll understand why I chickened out. It was almost as if the storm was trying to tell me that it wasn’t playing around and that it didn’t fancy ending up in a free rain sound library.
Thankfully, I managed to record some fantastic rain and thunder sounds during this heavy storm, and you can now download them for free.
Rain Loops
Most of the samples in the “Rain” and “Distant Thunder” folders have been edited to loop perfectly. You can easily connect multiple copies of the same audio file in an audio track inside your DAW to create infinite rain loops.
The provided loops can work at any tempo, and of course, there is no need to use time-stretching because the loops do not contain rhythmic content.
Thunder Sounds
The “Heavy Thunder” samples are provided as one-shots. They have long tails, so it’s very easy to layer them on top of a rain loop and get natural-sounding results.
In the audio example embedded in the sidebar, a single rain sample was looped five times, with four different heavy thunder samples layered on top.
How To Use Free Rain Sound Effects
The heavy thunder samples have been normalized to -0.1 dB to ensure maximum volume without clipping. The rain and distant thunder loops have been normalized to values ranging from -12 dB to -6 dB, depending on the overall atmosphere and the feel of the loop.
The rain sounds will probably be rather quiet in your mix anyway, so the normalization settings reflect this.
No effects were used on any of the sounds provided in the pack. They were only trimmed to find the perfect loop start and endpoints. You can always use additional EQ and dynamic processing to make these recordings fit your project perfectly.
I suggest filtering some of the low-frequency content, as anything below 60 Hz can most likely be removed without impacting the sound of the samples.
Summary
Rain Sounds includes a collection of rain and thunder sound effects for free download.
All included samples are available in stereo 24-bit WAV format with a 44.1 kHz sampling rate. There are 64 individual audio samples inside, adding up to 659 MB of audio data.
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