Any sound you like!

What's important is that...

- You are the sole creator of the sound (i.e. you didn't use any library sounds or content that you don't own the rights to)

- You are legally allowed to share your sound with others

- You agree to grant the other participants permission to use your submission in their work

Apart from that, whether you share a forest ambience you recorded near your home or a highly-designed sci-fi weapon sound is up to you! We do however urge you to ensure the sounds are of a reasonable loudness in correlation to the type of sound you are submitting.

The sound you upload will be shared with everyone who participates in that month's swap.

The files collected in the SFX Swap will not be shared anywhere else without your explicit permission.

That's very generous of you and you're welcome to do that if you like!

Understand that you will still receive the same bundle of user submissions as everyone else at the end of the week, no matter how much you share yourself.

As with all audio work, it's in everyone's best interest to receive files of the highest possible quality.

We suggest you upload WAV files with a minimum sample rate of 48kHz and bit depth of 24Bit.

Naming your sounds well is also vital as it helps other sound designers easily integrate them into their workflow. There is no naming convention that you must follow to share your sounds here but we highly recommend the Universal Category System (UCS).

Please note: If your files are named in a way that makes them unusable for other sound designers (e.g. "recording.wav"), they will be deleted.

You are not giving up any rights to the sounds you upload. You are still the sole owner of your sound just as other participants are still the sole owners of their sounds.

During the upload you will tick a box agreeing to grant all recipients of your uploaded sound (i.e. the other participants) a license to use your sound effect in commercial and/or non-commercial work.

We specifically do not grant permission for any sounds downloaded from the SFX Swap to be used to train AI.

At the end of each submission period, we have to gather the submissions, create a download link, and send it via email to all the participants.

So far that email has always come the day after the submission window closes, but please be patient as this may not be possible every month due to schedule conflicts or other unforeseen issues.

We use .rar files to compress the rewards. This makes the rewards file smaller, speeds up downloads, and helps us save space on our server. To open a .rar file, you will need to use a third party utility such as The Unarchiver (Mac) or WinRar (Windows). They are both free and easy to use.

Every month a theme from the UCS categorization system is voted on over at our Discord. You join the competition simply by submitting a sound using the correct UCS naming. The winner gets voted on by the community out of the teams top 10 picks via a poll a few days after the swap closes, usually with fantastic prizes to be won! The idea is that we can fill gaps in our sound libraries together by targeting specific categories of sounds. The sounds then get shared to all participants of that months swap.

Sure thing! We'd love to hear from you, get in contact with us at [email protected]

If you still have any questions, please send them via the contact form.