About us

We provide free sound effects to download as well as royalty free music for use in audio, video and online projects that include: games; films; Youtube; TV and radio programmes; podcasts; audiobooks; advertising; presentations; for schools and teachers and much more.

Our Roots

ZapSplat was founded by Alan McKinney who recorded his first sound effect back in 1998. After studying music production and working as a sound engineer in London, Alan set up his first sound effects library in 2004, followed by his second in 2007. His personal library grew quickly and in 2015, Alan decided he’d prefer to work supporting new creatives and those starting their careers by offering the majority of his sounds to them for free and set up ZapSplat.com. Things grew quickly and within a couple of years, thousands of people were enjoying his sounds, so he opened up ZapSplat to contributors too.

Fast forward to today and we now not only work to support up-and-coming creatives, but we see our sounds used by some of the leading media, game, film and TV companies and broadcasters all over the world. Many users who used ZapSplat while students, continue to use and promote our library throughout their careers, bringing our sound effects to a wider audience of hobbyists, students and professionals alike.

ZapSplat also acquires the distribution rights to some of the best sound libraries available, bringing a range of content and growing our general library into one of the largest online. You can view a list of all our contributors here.

We now have over 1.6 million members, are fast approaching 100,000 sounds and see around 20,000 people use our service every day!

Who are we

Alan is now joined by a small team who work to offer amazingly fast support, run our Discord community and record new sounds daily. Meet the team…