Building the world's largest open sound library

FOLEY turns every phone into a sound effects studio. Creators record the world around them, AI categorizes each sound instantly, and everything goes into the public domain.

The Problem

Sound effects are everywhere in media — games, films, apps, AI assistants, electric vehicles. But the supply chain is broken. Professional sound libraries charge thousands of dollars per year. Free alternatives are scattered, poorly labeled, and inconsistent in quality. And AI companies training audio models face an even harder challenge: finding diverse, real-world sounds with clean licensing.

Meanwhile, 5 billion people carry high-quality microphones in their pockets every day.

How FOLEY Works

1

Record

Open the app and capture any sound around you — a door closing, rain on a window, a coffee grinder, traffic. Your phone records at 48kHz/24-bit quality.

2

Classify

Google's YAMNet AI runs on your device and instantly categorizes the sound into one of 521 classes. No internet needed. Your sound is tagged before it even uploads.

3

Contribute

Your recording joins the CC0 public domain library — free for anyone to use, forever. You earn FOL creator credits for every contribution.

Why CC0?

Creative Commons Zero — No rights reserved

Every sound in FOLEY is released under CC0. That means anyone — individuals, companies, AI researchers, game developers — can use, modify, and distribute these sounds for any purpose without attribution, permission, or payment. We believe sound should be free.

The value isn't in locking sounds behind a paywall. It's in the infrastructure that continuously collects, classifies, and delivers diverse real-world audio at scale. The sounds are free. The pipeline is what matters.

FOL Creator Credits

FOL credits are our way of saying thank you. Every time you contribute a quality recording, you earn credits. Other creators can tip you for great work. FOL credits can be spent on bounties and premium features within the app.

FOL credits are not cryptocurrency. They're not traded on any exchange. They're simply creator credits — a recognition system that rewards the people who build this library.

For Enterprise

AI companies, automotive manufacturers, smart home platforms, and game studios all need diverse, labeled, real-world audio data. FOLEY provides a continuous pipeline of pre-classified sounds via API — with custom bounties to target specific categories you need.

Interested in a data partnership? Contact us at foley@aypsound.com.

The Technology

FOLEY is built on modern infrastructure designed for scale and privacy. The iOS app uses SwiftUI with Apple's SoundAnalysis framework (powered by YAMNet) for on-device classification. The backend runs on Supabase with Cloudflare R2 for zero-egress audio storage. Everything is designed to handle millions of recordings while keeping creator data private.

Join the Beta

We're looking for early creators who want to help build something meaningful. Sign up and be the first to know when the app launches.

Sign Up for Beta