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[Mittens]

Yeah, just rip all your sounds from popular games until you know exactly where the game needs a noise or a melody, once it's all final you can worry about replacing the audio with original material. (obviously finish doing that before selling the game)

[oahda]

While I can't really make music, I love tinkering with sound effects, so I often add those in pretty early and then have someone else make the music.

During the last Ludum Dare, I made a game with a block being lowered from a chain, for example, and I got really exited – as soon as I had coded it up visually and functionally – about giving it a chain lowering sound and then a loud stopping sound, much like the style of Zelda sound effects, right away, and so I did. And then a bunch of sound effects got put in continuously throughout the process, quite a while before my girlfriend (who was also busy doing graphics and level design) had made some music to put in as well. I actually made them with my mouth and lots of manipulation. You can't hear that they were originally human at all. Great fun!

For my current big game (sub game the devlog of which is linked in my sig) I haven't even put in an audio system yet, tho. I'm not sure what library/-ies I want to use just yet. So I'll have to leave that aside for a while. But that hasn't stopped me from thinking about and writing down notes about specific sound effects I want in there later. For my other project without a time limit – a puzzle platformer I'm making with my girlfriend – which I'm making in Unity much like the last LD game, sound effects are probably sure to come soon, tho. We're almost done with a specific puzzle section that has some stuff going on, like a chandelier crashing into the floor and crystals scattering all over the place. Can't wait to put sound to that!

So yeah. I agree with ThemsAllTook. Placeholder sounds – especially effects – provide a great deal of immersion into the final product, without necessarily being final, much like placeholder graphics. They motivate further progress when you see (hear!) how nicely things are beginning to become unified into a solid and lifelike system.

So do it, I say. Do put in placeholder audio. But add a button or line of code you can put in to turn it off; repeatedly restarting a game with audio can be pretty annoying during development, and you might want to listen uninterrupted to music while you code. But do include it.

It's also a really nice way to further immerse others while showing your WIP to them.

[jagraybox]

Sound goes a long way for a prototype.
If you're going to be showing people your prototype or testing it at all, you should add some sound in early. Some elements just need some sort of audio feedback to test well. For instance, a sword slash might be well programmed and look okay in a prototype, but the tester might still feel unsatisfied if they don't hear even a simple *slash* sound.

Although generally, I'm in agreement with the others in this thread. You're going to be changing all of the sounds later. Just get placeholders in, and worry about them more later.