Soundscape Recording Search

What it is for

You need a real recording of a place — rain in Rome, birds in a Berlin forest, traffic on a Vienna ring road — and you need to know you may use it. This tool searches Wikimedia Commons, the free media archive behind Wikipedia, for audio files with coordinates and returns each one with its licence, author, a ready attribution line, the coordinates and links to the file page and the file itself.

Only recordings under CC0, public domain, CC BY or CC BY-SA are listed by default — the licences that allow remixing. NonCommercial, NoDerivatives, GFDL-only, Free Art and files without licence data are left out and counted, unless you tick Also list recordings that cannot be remixed; they then appear marked as not usable.

The tool does not download, host or check the audio itself, and it cannot guarantee that the licence data on Commons is correct. It is the search behind the Earth Explorer in Soundscape Atlas.

Worked example

We searched around Vienna on 1 November 2026: Region “Around a point”, Latitude 48.2082, Longitude 16.3738, Radius 100 km, Results per page 5.

The summary read “5 recordings found (within 100 km of 48.2082, 16.3738).” The table listed:

A 100 km circle around Vienna reaches into Slovakia, which is why a pheasant and a blue tit recorded there appear. All five are CC BY-SA, so a mix that uses any of them must credit the author and be shared under CC BY-SA too. Commons changes every day, so the same search can return other files later.

How to read the result

• Summary and metrics — how many usable recordings were found, how many were left out because of their licence or because they look like music (only with the “Ambience without music” category), and the Next offset for the following page.
• Table — title, licence, whether it is usable in scenes, author (“(not stated)” when the file page names nobody), length, coordinates and Tags. Tags are a keyword guess from the title, description and Commons categories.
• Attribution lines — one TASL line per recording: title, author, licence with its link, “via Wikimedia Commons” and the file page. Copy them into your credits.
• Commons search string — the exact query that was sent, for example filetype:audio nearcoord:100km,48.2082,16.3738.
• In the JSON result, fileUrl is the original file and mp3Url is Wikimedia’s MP3 transcode, which plays in every browser.

Tips and common mistakes

• Only a small share of Commons audio has coordinates. If a point returns nothing, widen the radius or pick a whole region.
• Whole world still requires coordinates; Anywhere also finds files without them.
• Keep search words plain. Operators such as incategory: are removed on purpose.
• Use Skip the first results with the Next offset value to page through long result lists.
• Region and world searches are cached for 12 hours, so repeating them is fast; searches around a point always ask Commons again.
• If Commons answers “busy”, wait a minute and try again — very large regions are the most expensive searches.

FAQ

Is every listed recording free to use?

Under its licence, yes: CC0 and public domain need no credit, CC BY and CC BY-SA need attribution, and CC BY-SA mixes must keep that licence. Check the file page before publishing, because the licence data comes from Commons as published.

Why do some results have no author?

The Commons file page does not name one. The tool never fills in a name; the attribution then says “unknown author”.

Can I get recordings that are not on Commons?

No. This tool only searches Wikimedia Commons.

Does the tool store what I search?

Region and world searches are cached on the server for 12 hours so that Commons is asked less often. Searches around a point are not cached; their coordinates are only sent to Wikimedia Commons as part of the query.