Common Sound Licenses, Explained

Building your perfect soundscape sometimes requires adding sounds you found online. Next to the download button, most free sound sites will either display or link the "license" associated with using it. A license is the creator's terms for how their work can be used, copied and shared. Many free sounds are covered by some form of a Creative Commons license, but some sites and libraries have their own royalty-free terms.

Read on to learn what the most common licenses actually mean for your Blankie library.

Licenses you're most likely to find

For the most part, Creative Commons licenses can be described using modular groups of letters. The more letters it has, the more restrictions attached. Here's some of the most common ones used by free sound creators online:

• CC0 (public domain): no strings whatsoever. A CC0 or public domain license means you can use it, remix it or share it with no credit needed (but often still appreciated).
• CC BY (attribution): free to use, but credit the creator whenever you share or publish work that includes the sound, even if what you would use it for earns money.
• CC BY-NC (attribution, noncommercial): like CC BY, it's totally fine for personal use, and if you'd re-share it you need to credit the creator, but no matter what you do with it the sound can't be used in a project you'd charge for without the creator's permission.

Those three cover almost every sound on a library like Freesound. Two more letters turn up now and then elsewhere: SA (sharealike) means any remix you share has to carry the same license, and ND (no derivatives) means you can only share the sound exactly as the creator published it.

Here's the whole family at a glance:

You might also run into version numbers like CC BY 2.0 or CC BY-NC 3.0, especially on older Freesound uploads. The number is just the edition of the legal text, and 4.0 is the current one. The letters generally mean the same thing across versions, just with different versions of their underlying legal text, so for picking a sound you can read a 2.0 or 3.0 license the same way as a 4.0. If you plan to use sounds commercially, it's always a good idea to go read the fine print of any sounds you're using.

Non-Creative Commons licenses

Some archives write their own terms. The BBC Sound Effects library's RemArc licence, for instance, covers personal and educational use but not commercial use.

What different licenses mean for listening

If you're importing a sound to play privately on your own devices, any of these licenses are fine. Listening at home isn't republishing. Grab whatever sounds best to you.

People sometimes reach for "fair use" here, but private listening doesn't even need it. Fair use is about reusing someone's work inside something new, like a film clip in a review. License terms govern copying and distribution, and pressing play in your own headphones is neither.

What different licenses mean for sharing

The license matters more once a sound leaves your device. Share a preset that includes custom sounds and the audio files travel along with it. For CC BY sounds, keeping the author and source attached is exactly how the credit travels too.

Appropriate credit usually means more than a name. For CC BY and the other attribution licenses, pass along whatever the creator supplied: their name (plus any other parties they ask you to credit), a link to the sound, the license it's under (a link to the license text is best), and any copyright or disclaimer notice that came with it. Licenses older than version 4.0 also ask for the title of the work, when it has one.

Keep track with Blankie's Credits fields

Every sound you add to Blankie has optional Credits fields for the original work's name, author, URL to where you got it and what license it uses. Fill them in at import time and you'll always know where a sound came from, and so will anyone you share a preset with.

This is the same standard Blankie holds itself to. Every built-in sound is openly licensed, with full attribution in the app and on the credits page.

Licenses can look intimidating, but it really comes down to two habits: read the terms before you use a sound, and keep the credit attached to it.

What different licenses mean for selling

Selling changes the math, since now there's money involved and every sound's license actually has to allow it. That's enough of its own topic that it gets a dedicated guide: Can you sell Blankie sound packs?