Whoosh Soundboard: 56 Sounds, Free to Play

What this page covers

A whoosh is the sound of something moving past: a whip pan, a trailer transition, a fireball crossing the frame, a punch that lands with more air than impact. This board collects them — clean swishes, cinematic hits, boom versions, a creepy one, and a handful built for a specific game or editor.

Like the riser board, this is a tool shelf rather than a joke collection. The rows are short, they are mostly noise rather than tone, and their job is to cover a cut so the viewer does not notice it.

Every sound on this board

The table below is the inventory. The useful distinction is in the titles: a "transition" whoosh is meant to sit between two shots, a "hit" whoosh has an impact at the end, and a "boom" is the low, heavy variant used when something large moves. The game and editor references are provenance, not genre.

Three parts of a whoosh

Every whoosh on this board is made of the same three ingredients, mixed differently.

The movement is a filtered noise sweep. It rises or falls in pitch depending on whether the object is approaching or leaving, and it is what makes the ear read direction.

The transient is the small click or snap at the start or end. Without it, the whoosh sounds like a gust of wind rather than like an object; with it, the ear can place the moment of the cut.

The tail is what remains after the movement stops. A whoosh with no tail sounds clipped; a whoosh with too much tail sounds like a jet passing, which is a different effect.

Placing one on a cut

The mistake that gives amateur edits away is centring the whoosh on the cut. A movement sound has direction, so it should end where the new shot begins: the whoosh covers the last few frames of the old shot and finishes on the first frame of the new one. Put it in the middle and the cut feels late.

The second mistake is using one whoosh for every transition. A video where every cut has the same swish sounds like a slideshow with a sound effect, and the viewer starts hearing the effect instead of the content. Use a whoosh when the cut needs to be hidden, and let the rest be silent.

The third is level. A whoosh is a background element, and it should be quieter than the thing it is covering — the voice, the music, the impact. If it is the loudest element, it stops being a transition and becomes an event.

The variants worth knowing

The plain swish rows are the workhorses. They are the least characterful and the most reusable, and they are what you want for a fast cut in a talking-head video.

The cinematic trailer rows are bigger: longer tails, more low end, and a rise before the movement. They are excellent for a scene change and too heavy for a cut between two sentences.

The boom whooshes are the low variant. They work when something large is supposed to be moving — a door, a vehicle, a character entering — and they double as impacts if you trim the movement off the front.

The creepy whoosh is the specialist. It is a swish with the pitch bent downward and a bit of noise left in the tail, and it reads as horror rather than as motion.

Whooshes in OBS and in a call

For streams, the useful pattern is a scene transition: put the whoosh on a media source, trigger it with the scene change, and let it run under the switch. Keep it four to six decibels below the game audio so it does not become part of the show.

In a voice call, whooshes are the one family on this site that works as a punctuation mark rather than as a joke. A single swish after a sentence reads as "moving on", which is a genuinely useful thing to be able to say without speaking.

On a phone, these clips lose their low end and keep their movement, which is the right trade: a whoosh is legible even when the bottom is gone. The boom variants are the ones that suffer, turning into a soft thud.

Where the audio comes from

Some rows are generic sound-design assets, some are captures from games and trailers, and at least one names the editor who made it. The board owns none of them. For commercial work, treat this page as an index and confirm the licence at the source.

Questions people ask

Riser or whoosh? A riser builds towards something; a whoosh passes by. If the next shot needs a run-up, use a riser; if the cut just needs covering, use a whoosh.

Why do some whooshes sound like wind? Because the transient was trimmed off, or because the source was a noise sweep with no object attached. The rows with a hard start are the ones that read as motion.

Can I layer two? You can, and trailer editors do — a low boom under a high swish is a standard combination. Just check the sum does not clip.

How this board is maintained

Titles are kept as uploaded, duplicates stay as separate rows where the audio differs, and the count in the heading is taken after the site's content screen has run.