Free Samples & Loops Round-Up (March 2016) + Easter Sales!

Apparently, March is a very busy month for sound designers and sample makers. We’ve have witnessed the release of dozens of awesome soundware freebies this month, some of which (unfortunately) haven’t made it into our main news section. All of them are listed on this page, though, along with a selection of huge discounts on music making software and soundware.

The list below is organized into two parts. The first part of the list features a set of ongoing discounts and sales (including soundware and software products), most of which will end on March 31st. The second part features a bunch of soundware freebies that were released this month, including audio samples, Ableton Live packs, Kontakt instruments, and so on.

Easter Sales

Loopmasters are running a big sale, offering a 40% OFF discount on a range of premium products, including releases and bundles by Niche Audio, Raw Cutz, Dub Drops, Zenhiser, and others. They are also offering the CAPSUN ProAudio Label Sampler 2 for just $1.41 (the price of download bandwidth costs).

Pluginboutique also offers a bunch of sales, including a 50% off Sugarbytes sale, 50% off Cakewalk Z3ta+2 and Cakewalk Rapture Pro virtual instruments, 50% off FXpansion BFD 3, 60% off SONiVOX Film Score Companion (which we reviewed here), and tons of other discounts.

Freebies

ModeAudio has released Free Vinyl Drum Rack, a superb Ableton Live drum rack based on a collection of vinyl and turntable recordings. Although the rack itself requires the latest version of Live in order to work, the download archive also includes the WAV files, meaning that it is fully compatible with virtually any sampler instrument out there.

Wave Alchemy has released a new commercial sample library called 2 Keyboards Worth of Kicks. The title is pretty much self explanatory, in the sense that the library contains enough kick drum samples to cover the range of two MIDI keyboards. In classic Wave Alchemy fashion, they are also offering a taster pack which is available for direct free download from their website. Free user account registration is required, but once you’re registered, you will get access to a large amount of top quality Wave Alchemy freebies.

The Loop Loft introduced The Vibes, a free stems collection for Native Instruments Traktor. They are also running a 50% off sale at the moment.

The Unfinished (free patches available at the bottom of the page) has released a free collection of taster presets handpicked from their new commercial Zebra Gravastar sound bank for U-He Zebra.

BHK Samples is back with BHK Samples Leftovers, an awesome collection of drum and bass sounds which were meant for release on their website, but ended up in this SoundCloud-hosted freebie pack.

ForceSampling has released the free Toxic Metals sound library for NI Kontakt 5. The instrument is based on a set of 35 recordings (with multiple round-robins) of various metals being hit with objects like hammers and crowbars, as well as some more “musical” stuff such as drumsticks. A customized Kontakt instrument is also included, featuring filter and envelope controls, along with various effects.

Soquelle gave away a collection of Roland TR-808 drum machine hits that were re-sampled from the E-Mu SP-1200 sampler. A perfect mixture of analog and digital (the SP-1200 offers 12-bit resolution, resulting in some wonderfully warm crunch and grit). The samples are hosted on Bandcamp, so you’ll need a working email address in order to grab the download.

Legowelt has released Smackos AMIGA 909, a free Ableton Live pack featuring the sounds from Legowelt’s old AMIGA 909 sample floppy disc (yes – a floppy disc). I haven’t had the chance to test these because the download only contains an ALP file, meaning that you’ll need Ableton in order to run it (no WAVs inside).

World Rabbit released Poor Recorder Alto, a very cute looking and nice sounding recorder sample library for Native Instruments Kontakt.

Function Loops has released Label Sampler 2016 Part 1 with over 600 MB of royalty free loops that are mostly suitable for use in trance tunes. A valid email address is required in order to receive the download link.

Double Trouble Audio has announced the release of Commodore 64 Percussion and FX, a free C64 sample pack with over 300 percussion and SFX sounds from the good old SID chip (recorded from a HardSID). I’m quite a C64 fan myself and you might also want to check out my free Commodore 64 Synthesizer Sessions library.

Sample Modern has released Keys For EDM, a small but useful collection of electric piano loops meant for use in electronic music. The loops are rendered at 130 BPM and are provided as 24-bit WAV files (45 loops in total).

Electronisounds introduced Event Horizon, a free audio loop pack based on their recently released Dune 2 sound bank. The samples are hosted on Facebook (along with a set of hardcore kick sounds), but you don’t need to be a Facebook user in order to download them.

Boyss-Sound-{e}-scapes has released their 1st Year Free pack, featuring a collection of atmospheric guitars and synthesized drones for Native Instruments Kontakt 5.

Rossignol-Studio has announced the release of Orgue De Barbarie, a rather simple but nice sounding barrel organ sample library for Native Instruments Kontakt.

contortDistort provided a cool little freebie for NI Reaktor users. Their latest release called Metaphysical Fabrications contains 52 new patches (snapshots) and 30 samples for Reaktor’s (also free and quite popular among Reaktor users) Metaphysical Function ensemble by Christian Kjeldsen.

Rattly And Raw introduced The Hipster’s Bongos, a totally weird (but in a good way) percussion sample library for Kontakt 5 and above. You get a very simple user interface and a range of one shot bongos samples + a set of more than just slightly annoying vocal samples.

Nick Dwyer has released several Ableton Live and NI Reaktor instruments on his new website Flintpope.

Sonic Bloom has released Ploid!, a freely downloadable noise maker and drone generator for Max for Live, made by Max For Cats.

Sonus Dept. has introduced Deepwig, a free collection of presets for Bitwig’s built-in instruments.

Cymatics has released a collection of over 275 foley sounds recorded at Target. A valid email address is required in order to get the download, however the included sounds are pure quality. Many thanks to our friend Torley for the tip!

That’s all we had in store for you in this month’s edition of Free Soundware Round-Up! Do you like this new format? In my opinion, compiling a brief list of all free soundware products that weren’t featured in our main news section is much better than simply skipping these freebies and not covering them on BPB at all.