Freesound
Perhaps because I have very little original talent of my own, I’m a big supporter of the Free Culture movement and associated organisation Creative Commons. I just came across the excellent Freesound project via the Creative Commons blog. It’s kind of like Flickr for sounds - not songs and music - and once you start pottering around on the site it can be just as dagerous a time sink as the photo sharing site can be.
There are currently over 50,000 sound samples that have been contributed by users under the Creative Commons Sampling Plus License. The quality of sound recordings vary greatly, but some of them are quite amazing. This 3.5 minute recording of a thunderstorm pointed to in this interview with Freesound’s founder is just beautiful and I’m very tempted to put it on loop while I take a well earned nap.
They also have some dapper T-shirts.