Download Rain Sounds Free – Royalty Free Rain Sounds

Get your feet wet with this pack of royalty-free rain sound effects for sound designers and video editors, and don’t sweat the copyright when using them in your projects

For videographers, directors and producers, rain can be one of the worst things to work with – whether it’s not raining and a scene demands it; or its raining and a scene needs it to not be! For us audio types, though, rain is less likely to stop play, and can even be quite a fun part of creating sound effects and sound design for any scene.

Here, we’ve compiled a free rain sound download, making your task of finding rain audio even easier. And to make it childsplay, those who use Krotos Studio can generate their own custom rain sounds from their dry workstation.

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These sounds are royalty-free so can be used without needing to pay a license fee or to even obtain a license at all! All these downloadable rain sound effects are presented as high-quality 24-bit WAV files at a sampling rate of 48kHz.

But Wait! Design your own Bespoke Pouring Rain Sounds with Krotos Studio

‍Krotos Studio is a powerful sound design tool for filmmakers and sound designers. You can think of it as a Foley studio in your computer. It enables you to design and perform original sound effects without any need for expensive microphones, or a recording studio. Krotos Studio has a diverse range of rain and water sounds, and the pack above was actually made using it! When you want to create a longer, shorter or custom rain sound to exactly match a scene, Krotos Studio is a great solution.

Why rain sounds?

Rain audio makes a staple addition to most audiophiles’ toolkits. Whether you’re a sound designer for film and media, or a musician, there’s a good chance you’ll be in need of a heavy rain sound effect or two at some point in your creative exploration.

Because rainfall is an unpredictable weather condition and not always feasible for everyone to record live, building up a library of royalty free rain sounds is surely a wise idea. Rain audio can be used in a wide range of applications to add immersion, and even an emotional tone to a sonic scene.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtWHwRHmDEU

An application like Krotos Studio can be a great resource for anyone who regularly works with audio because it comes with a whole host of sound environment presets–each with modifiable parameters to help you create dynamic, immersive audio for your projects quickly and effectively.

Using rain in your productions strategically

As mentioned in the introduction, rain carries a lot of emotional meaning to us as human beings. Rain is very rarely associated with something positive. Whilst rain audio can be used like any other audio asset merely to create an immersive sonic environment, it can also be used tactically to communicate a deeper meaning to our audiences.
For example, a game designer might choose to make one of their levels set on a rainy day. The video game Heavy Rain (obviously) contains a lot of rainfall, not just as a mere coincidence, but to give off a certain mood, and even indicate various plot details throughout the playthrough.

Check out this 10 Video Games Where It Constantly Rains list.

The Batman Arkham Knight series (mentioned in the above article) also features a lot of dark, gloomy, rain-filled scenery to give the game a sinister, almost horrific vibe–like something bad is always about to happen. You too can use rain, combined with other assets to the same effect in your productions.

What sound assets go with rain effects?

There’s a wide range of natural environments where rainfall is present. You can pretty much add rain to any outdoor environment to give your production a completely different mood.

Some sound effects that typically go well with rain sounds effects are: animal noises (if at night, owls, birds, possums, or even slithering snakes), traffic, people conversating, thunder, wind, and many more. There’s really no limit to the imagination when building a synthetic rain sound environment.

Combining royalty free rain sounds with one of the presets in Krotos Studio is a great way to build a high-quality sound environment containing an abundance of noises with next-to-no effort. Krotos Studio aims to provide sound designers with an array of sound assets to help us whip up advanced, realistic sound environments in no time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLGpzg-fnNw&t=504s

You can try out the free version of Krotos Studio now for instant access to 14 sound design presets, or upgrade to the pro version for access to 200+ high-grade cinematic sound presets for use in your productions.

FAQs

What Foley sound is often used for rain in movies?

It might come to your surprise to learn that the sound of frying bacon is often used to emulate rain sounds effects on the Hollywood screen. It’s a good thing only the audio is being processed and not the smell, otherwise it might give it away!

Otherwise, it’s not uncommon for Foley artists to use water sprinklers and watering cans to rain water onto noisy surfaces like corrugated iron, in order to capture rain effects for use in post production.

How do they make it look like it's raining in movies?

Set designers often have to get creative when it comes to adding fake rain to their movie scenes. When budget isn’t an issue, this can be done by attaching large hoses to hydrants, or even fire trucks, to cover a wide area at once.

When working indoors, devices called rain curtains and rain bars are often used in conjunction with tactical lighting and camera angle positioning to dramatise the onscreen rain effects. Check out Spenser Sakurai’s DIY fake rain techniques in the video below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=ttpRJG4aAgI

Why is it hard to film rain?

Aside from the technical complications of filming in the rain (electronics and water don’t usually mix well, and any touchscreen equipment will also be a pain to work in the rain), natural rain can be hard to capture with a camera due to the small size of the droplets and the rapidity of their falling.

For this reason, many filmmakers will actually opt to use staged rain, even when it is raining outside. With the right equipment, using fake rain gives them more control over their set, which is always ideal when conducting a masterpiece.

Sound designers will then add rain sounds effects to any media requiring it in post-production.