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The Freepik Sound Effects API provides programmatic access to a catalog of royalty-free sound effects. Search by keyword, filter by category and premium status, retrieve detailed metadata, and download audio files for use in your projects.

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What you can do

  • Full-text search: Query sound effects by title, tags, and categories using the q parameter
  • Category filtering: Browse 42 categories organized in a parent-child hierarchy (e.g., ambience > forest, foley > footsteps, transitions > whooshes)
  • Premium filtering: Control whether results include premium content via include-premium (default: free only)
  • Flexible sorting: Sort by relevance, popularity, download_count, created_at, duration, or title with ascending/descending support
  • Pagination: Navigate results with limit (1-1000, default 10) and offset parameters
  • Detailed metadata: Access title, tags, category hierarchy, duration, popularity score, download count, premium status, and creation date
  • Direct downloads: Get CDN-hosted download URLs for sound effect audio files

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Authentication

All requests require an API key via the x-freepik-api-key header. See the Quickstart and Authentication.

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Endpoints

GET /v1/sound-effects

Search and filter sound effects

GET /v1/sound-effects/{sfx-id}

Get detailed sound effect information by ID

GET /v1/sound-effects/{sfx-id}/download

Download a sound effect audio file

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Parameters overview

The search endpoint supports the following filters:
ParameterTypeDescription
qstringFull-text search across titles, tags, and categories
categorystringFilter by category slug (e.g., "ambience", "foley", "transitions")
include-premiumbooleanInclude premium sound effects (default: false)
order_bystringSort order: "relevance", "popularity", "-popularity", "download_count", "-download_count", "created_at", "-created_at", "duration", "-duration", "title", "-title". Defaults to "relevance" when q is provided, "-popularity" otherwise
limitintegerResults per page: 1-1000 (default: 10)
offsetintegerPagination offset (default: 0)

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Available categories

Sound effects are organized into 42 categories with a parent-child hierarchy. Use a parent category slug to include all its subcategories.
Parent CategorySubcategories
Ambienceforest, city-ambience, room-tones, rain-and-storm, beach-and-ocean, wind
Foleyweapons-and-warfare, footsteps, explosions-and-crashes, kicks-and-punches, clothing, debris
Human Soundsgenre, glitch-and-noise, cartoon-voices-and-sounds, sci-fi-sounds, ghosts-and-horror-transitions, gaming-and-fantasy
Interface and Alertsuser-interface
Musicaldrum-and-percussion-loops, vocal-phrases, one-shots, melodic-loops
Realisticwildlife, machines-and-tools, household-objects, cars-and-airplanes, water, electronic-devices, pets-and-farm-animals
Transitionsepic-transitions, cinematic-impacts, whooshes, risers, intros-and-outros

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Use cases

  • Build a sound effects browser or audio picker into your app or CMS
  • Search sound effects by category for video editing and post-production workflows
  • Programmatically download royalty-free SFX during content production pipelines
  • Create curated sound libraries filtered by popularity, duration, or category
  • Add ambient sounds and UI feedback to games and interactive applications

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FAQ

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Is there a rate limit?

Yes. See Rate limits.

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What license applies to the sound effects?

Refer to the License agreement.

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What audio format are the sound effects available in?

Sound effects are delivered as audio files via CDN-hosted download URLs.

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Can I filter for only free sound effects?

Yes. Set include-premium to false (the default) to return only free sound effects.

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How does category filtering work?

Use the category parameter with a category slug. Filtering by a parent category (e.g., ambience) includes all its subcategories (e.g., forest, city-ambience, rain-and-storm). Each sound effect belongs to one category, and the response includes the full category hierarchy with parent information.

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How does sorting work?

Use the order_by parameter. Prefix a field name with - for descending order (e.g., -popularity for most popular first). When a search query (q) is provided, results default to "relevance". Without a query, results default to "-popularity".

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What metadata is returned for each sound effect?

Each sound effect includes: id, title, tags, category (with parent), duration (in seconds), is_premium, popularity score, download_count, file_url, and created_at timestamp.