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YouTube

Best Royalty Free Sound Effects for YouTube Shorts: Top 10 SFX & Playlists to Make Your Short-Form Videos Pop

Jourdan Aldredge

 A smart phone loads the YouTube app, getting ready to create content using royalty free sound effects for YouTube shorts.

Jan 29, 2025

YouTube Shorts is easily one of the best—and fastest growing—short form content platforms in the world these days. And while YouTube Shorts might never be as popular as the main YouTube platform, it’s encouraging to see just how quickly the audience for YouTube Shorts has grown.

Plus, for any content creators looking to get in on the fertile grounds of a new content vertical, it’s exciting to see new creatives and brands take advantage of these shifting tides to launch the next generation of creators.

It’s in that vein that we at Soundstripe are here to help any aspiring creators create the best YouTube Shorts that they can by providing them with high-quality royalty free sound effects for their short form videos.

If you’re looking to launch your brand on YouTube Shorts, these top sound effects can be a great way to give your videos that extra level of quality and sophistication, plus keep your content free of any potential copyright strikes or takedowns.

10 top royalty free sound effects for YouTube Shorts

A computer displays an audio mixing program which is adding royalty free sound effects for YouTube shorts to its content.

Let’s start off this article by giving you what you most likely came here for: royalty free sound effects for YouTube Shorts. Of course, there are tens of thousands of different sound effects in our full catalog, but we’ve done our best to highlight some of our top selections which might be ideal for the YouTube Shorts length and style of content.

These YouTube Shorts SFX would work great in any intros or outros for your short-form videos, or to just give your videos more atmosphere and sophistication. A few selections would also do well for comedic effect and add some laughter and fun to any videos in the comedy genre.

But enough talk, let’s check out some high-quality royalty free sound effects that would be perfect for your YouTube Shorts.

1. Toy Logo Sequence 01 Sound Effect

Description: Deep whooshes, wobbling, metallic clangs, and melodic element.

2. Cheer Happy Short Sound Effect

Description: Crowd cheering and bawling of joy and excitement in German.

3. Boo Short Sound Effect

Description: Crowd noisily catcalling. Single boos.

4. Battle Cry 02 Sound Effect

Description: Crowd shouting battle cries, very powerful. Attacking and swooping down on the enemy.

5. Laugh Applause Sound Effect

Description: Mixed crowd laughing and applauding.

6. City Train Passing Sound Effect

Description: Ambience in city commercial zone. Train passing by and forklift moving around in the background.

7. The Streets 01 Sound Effect

Description: Street ambience with truck/bus passing by.

8. Doorbell 01 Sound Effect

Description: Doorbell, "Ding Dong".

9. Call 01 Sound Effect

Description: Short, digital, positive melody with five sounds. Different pitches.

10. Distorted Sub Impact 01 Sound Effect

Description: Heavily distorted bass/kick impact with long decay.

These are just ten of our top selections; if you’d like to see thousands more, visit our full sound effects library as we’ll share some of our best curated sound effects playlists below.

How do sound effects work on YouTube Shorts?

If you’ve created any type of content for any social video platforms like TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube before, you’re probably at least a bit familiar with how sound works with video. Yet, unlike music, which can often be as simple as selecting a song in the upload interface, adding sound effects to many of these platforms can be a bit more complicated.

Yet, as we’ve covered in previous articles on the Soundstripe blog, here are the steps for how to add music to YouTube Shorts as a reference. And in truth, adding sound effects to YouTube Shorts specifically isn’t much different—especially since we do recommend that for users to get the highest quality video that they create their content on their own then upload the completed videos directly to YouTube.

The steps for adding sound effects would then be passed to your normal video and sound editing workflow where you’ll have complete control of when, where, and how to use as many sound effects in your videos as you’d like.

What are royalty free sound effects?

Multiple microphones are recording royalty free sound effects for YouTube shorts.

One thing we haven’t covered yet though is what this “royalty free” term that we’ve been throwing around means. Similar to music—and the royalty free music we offer here at Soundstripe—sound effects are copyright protected on platforms like YouTube and if you use sound effects which you haven’t properly licensed your YouTube Shorts can be liable to receive copyright strikes on Youtube and potentially have your videos muted or—worse yet—your channel banned.

That’s why your best bet for music or sound effects (or other video or photo assets, for that matter) is royalty free options that can be licensed from royalty free music websites like Soundstripe.

This is because sound effects, like songs and other musical tracks, are created by artists who deserve compensation. And that’s what royalty free music is (read here if you want to know more about what royalty free music is (and is not).)

Companies like Soundstripe handle both compensating the artists who created the music or sound effects and providing full protection and coverage for creators to use the music and sound effects on platforms like YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Twitch, etc.…

Our top sound effects playlists for YouTube Shorts

Now that we’ve explained some basics about how sound effects can be licensed and added to your YouTube Shorts videos, let’s get back to the good stuff. Here are some additional playlist which highlight some of our most popular sound effects for short-form content platforms like YouTube Shorts.

Human Nature Playlist

Description: Human sounds like humming, cheering, coughing, etc. Welcome to the human condition.

Atmosphere Playlist

Description: Background elements of urban and rural life to bring life to scene.

Epic Film Playlist

Description: Soundscapes, transitions, and hits designed for epic films and tv.

Foley Playlist

Description: Movement of various textures to add an extra layer of believability to your project.

Laughter Playlist

Description: Giggle and guffaw with this litany of laughter.

Phones Playlist

Description: Ringing, dial tones, and message alerts from modern-day smart phones to rotary style vintage telephones.

Sound Design Clips Playlist

Description: Cinematic sound effects, pre-arranged into powerful sequences, you can cut your footage to.

Of course, if you’d like to keep exploring more sound effects for YouTube Shorts, here are some additional royalty free sound effect playlists that would be great for your short-form content.

Tips for using royalty free sound effects in YouTube Shorts

man using laptop computer to record royalty free sound effects for YouTube Shorts

At the end of the day, adding sound effects to any video—whether that be YouTube Shorts, regular YouTube videos, or any other type of short-form content—can be either a small simple task or a huge undertaking.

It really comes down to your comfort with video and sound editing and just how much you want to make your videos feel more immersive, dynamic, and hard-hitting. However, to keep things simple, here are some helpful ways in which sound effects can help make your YouTube Shorts better, more fun, and more enjoyable overall:

  • Give your videos an ambient background to make it feel more immersive.
  • Create bumpers for your intros and outros to make your content feel more professional.
  • Add sound effects for action to make punches, kicks, and explosions feel more impactful.
  • Make motion feel more real and dynamic with whooshes.
  • Add laughter and goofy sound effects to help your viewers know it’s OK to laugh.

Royalty free sound effects will always be a relatively quick and easy way to add value to your content, so explore the options above and try them out for yourself as soon as possible.