The studio
Sound effects
Four and a half thousand public-domain sounds — clicks, impacts, whooshes, glitches, jingles, foley, creatures — searchable from inside the studio and dropped onto a lane as ordinary audio clips. Every one is free for commercial work, and nothing plays loud enough to hurt.
Where it is
Open the Plugins panel in the left rail and pick Sound Effects. The Sounds shelf of the Library also has a way in, carrying whatever you had typed, so searching there and continuing here is one click rather than a re-type.
Browsing
The panel opens on the packs. Pick one to read it end to end, or use a category in the rail — Interface, Impacts, Whooshes, Digital, Game, Foley, Human, Nature, Machines, Weapons, Ambience, Music — which gathers sounds of that kind from every pack at once. The search box spans the whole archive whichever shelf you are on, and understands #hashtags: #impact metal means tag impact and the word metal.
Every row draws its real waveform, at its real length, with a tick where the sound strikes — before a byte of audio is downloaded. The shape you scan is the shape you will hear.
Listening
Click a row to play it. The panel is built for going through sounds in a run rather than one at a time, so the keyboard does the work:
| Key | What it does |
|---|---|
| Space | Play or pause the armed sound |
| ↑ ↓ | Previous / next sound, playing as it goes |
| ← → | Scrub a second within the sound — hold Shift for five |
| ↵ | Add it to the timeline at the playhead |
| S | Star it |
| D | Dislike it — hidden everywhere after that |
| L | Cycle loop: off, all, one |
Playback here never touches the timeline. Space plays a sound while this window has focus, not your composition.
The ear guard
On by default, and the reason clicking through hundreds of files is pleasant. Sound libraries are mastered by hundreds of different people, and one brickwalled impact at the level the last quiet file needed genuinely hurts on headphones — after you have already heard it, which is too late.
The guard measures how loud each sound actually seems, not how loud its loudest sample is: a heavy impact and a tiny tick can both peak at full scale and be fifteen decibels apart to a human ear. Anything above the ceiling is brought down to it, and anything below is left completely alone — so a quiet sound stays quiet and you can still tell which of two impacts hits harder. When it is holding a sound down, the player says by how much.
The ceiling is in the settings, beside the volume. Turning the guard off can only make things louder than they were; it never changes what you export.
Preloading
The panel warms the sounds ahead of you — but only while you keep listening, and only one at a time. Play one sound and it fetches the next; work down a shelf and it leans a little further ahead, never more than four. It skips anything long, keeps the warmed set inside a memory budget, and drops the oldest when it fills. Turn it off in the settings and nothing is fetched until you play it.
Nothing else is speculative either. Opening the panel costs one small index; a pack costs that pack; a search only reaches the packs that could match. The archive can grow without the panel getting slower.
Adding a sound
Drag a row onto the stage or a timeline lane, press ↵, or hit Add in the player. The bytes stream in behind the gesture, so nothing waits on a download.
The settings hold what a sound lands with:
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Hit on playhead | Starts the clip early so the sound strikes where you dropped it, rather than beginning there. On by default. |
| Fade in / out | Edge fades, clamped so they can never overlap. |
| Gain | Clip level, in dB. |
| Pitch | Semitones, independent of speed. |
| Match audition level | Carries the ear guard’s correction onto the clip — not your monitoring volume. Off by default. |
These apply when you click, press ↵ or use Add. Dragging a sound onto a lane places the file as it is, like any other media drag.
Stars, dislikes and collections
Right-click any sound. Star floats it to the top of every list; Dislike hides it everywhere except the Disliked shelf, where you can take it back. Both have their own shelf in the rail.
Collectionsare lists you name, and they span content types — a “Trailer kit” can hold six sounds and four icons. All of it is kept on your device, across every project, because what you like is about you and not about one file. None of it copies any audio: a collection holds references, so starring four hundred sounds costs nothing.
Licensing
Everything in the archive is CC0 — public domain, free for commercial work, no attribution required. Each pack names its publisher anyway, because credit is the decent thing even when it is not the legal thing. The catalogue is built from Kenney’s audio packs, the public-domain archive at OpenGameArt — 37 publishers, each credited on its own pack — and a set synthesized for AtomCut. Nothing is offered that would put a condition on what you export.
Next: the timeline the clip lands on, or icons, the same idea for artwork.