Thought it’d be a good idea to make a thread to share where we all dig for samples online.
Here are some places where I’ve had some luck finding interesting stuff:
https://archive.org/details/prelinger
https://archive.org/details/culturalandacademicfilms
https://archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A"National+Film+Board+of+Canada"
Legowelt has nice packs from his many hardware units
I can’t even imagine going through this in a life time.
I’m going to be that guy and say that if you still like working with audio and sampling actually crate digging at a used media store is still awesome. Go for anything less than $5 on vinyl, cassette, CD… you can still get cassette players if you look and USB turn tables can be had for $100USD.
The best part is not knowing exactly what you are getting but you did spend some money on it so you gotta find those couple of sweet spots somewhere on the record that can be useful.
Like people bitch about not having vocals to use but do you know all the weird ass spoken word vinyls there are? Instructional stuff. Kids stories. I’ve got a Strawberry Shortcake vinyl that’ll keep me in weird rave vocals for an eon. Also there was a sweet spot in the 90s where they were making DJ only/not for sale promotional CDs of pop music with a capella tracks on them. They can be had reasonably on eBay and you can find them at flea markets and record shops as well.
I also love that I can just go to archieve.org or Legowelt’s homepage and download all kinds of cool, clean stuff to use.
Record shit off of YouTube. If you think everything has to be a 7000 bit whatever whatever .wav file I feel like you are doing it wrong lol.
We are spoiled for choice. Do it all.
Lots of good suggestions there!
I have a vcr hooked up to my mixer, thrift stores are great places to find all sorts of samples and nobody seems to want their vhs’ anymore. Also have been sampling a bunch of vhs’ from my childhood, it’s really nostalgic 
I need a record player and a cassette player now lol
My brother’s been watching a ton of Shaw Brothers movies on Netflix and has found sooo many good samples that we’ve been using lately, recorded it by feeding audio from one interface into another
ive hoarded a bunch of random vinyl i’ve been wanting to poach if i only could get my shitty record player to work :((((
@StrayMedicine yes! VHS is another gold mine. Side note, worn out VHS tape is the only analog media Ive recorded to affected the audio in a desireable way.
@7asid that stinks about your record player. I dont know anything about them. I just bought a cheap DJ belt drive one to listen to stuff and sample from. USB ones are pretty cheap?
yeah ive seen some pretty affordable ones, i haven’t dug into research on this yet but i’m wondering if some of them have better or worse sound quality in terms of sampling directly from the out
Just turntables in general or USB ones? Frankly I wouldn’t worry to much about it. You’ve got to be getting a standard 16bit whatever whatever .wav file from almost anything that records straight to digital. Which is plenty unless you are a complete snob IMO. The big thing would be gain vs. noise floor/distortion. Even here, if you are recording to a modern daw you you can just turn shit up as long as the recording sounds good.
Before I bought a DJ mixer I had a $20 dollar phono amp which gave me all the quality/gain I wanted from my turntable for sampling and listening/previewing purposes.
Don’t overthink it. If you want ultra clean, perfectly recorded samples just buy a really nice Kontakt library or multi-sampled instrument and cut to the chase.