Royalty free music services to recommend?

[Sebastian Alvarez]

I'm looking for any website or company that provides completely royalty free music for very cheap, without the need to mention the performer in the footage (that has a name that escapes me now). So far a friend recommended me footagefirm.com, where they have a few collections that you only have to pay shipping for, so each disc is about $9 and has about ten tracks. I bought three of them mostly to use in wedding videos, but they are nothing special, they're slightly better than elevator music, although a few of them are decent. They do have more collections but at over $100 per disc, so no thanks.

So can somebody recommend royalty free music at accessible prices? I've googled royalty free music and came up with a few but they're either too expensive or too lame.

[Les Wilson]

Well you can try royaltyfreemusic.com but from what you describe, it just may not exist i.e. you want high quality music with no royalties for very cheap. Like many things, you get what you pay for.

[Sebastian Alvarez]

royaltyfreemusic.com charges $120 for a CD with "wedding music" and it's elevator music. If it was really good music I could justify paying that much, but this sounds like some guy made it with a fancy keyboard, or maybe with just a music software.

Has anybody tried to get licensing rights for any kind of song that you would have in your CD collection? Like if I wanted to get permission to use a James Ingram song or another ballad from a similar artist, what would I have to do, and how much would I have to pay to use it on a wedding video?

Also, has anybody used music composing software such as Sony Acid loops, where you don't need to know music to create it? I'm thinking that as an alternative because so far most of the royalty free music I've heard is too simple and boring, and terribly expensive.

[Allan Black]

I don't know what music they have but look for this to grow and become huge ..

http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/digital-...sic-store.html

Cheers.

[Steve House]

Check out the SmartSounds library ( smartsounds.com ). You can audition tracks online and their SonicFire PRo software is a great tool for editing, timing, and remixing their tracks. You can purchase tracks individually online and they are always having special deals from their CD collection ... like right now they have several "6-packs" of 6 disks of 10 tracks or so each for $99.

[Sebastian Alvarez]

Thanks Allan and Steve, I'll listen to those later tonight after I'm done with my PJ20 CD :)

Alternatively, has anybody tried Acid Music Studio 8 with all those loop collections? Can you make decent songs with those loops if you are not a musician, or can you just make electronica? The software is about $70 and so are the loops, so it could pay off in the long run. However I never used it so I don't know if it takes too long to make a song, but if it's not too hard and you can do something nice then you can use it as much as you want and not worry about any copyright issues. Is anybody using this?

[Sebastian Alvarez]

Originally Posted by Allan Black

I don't know what music they have but look for this to grow and become huge ..

http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/digital-...sic-store.html

Cheers.

The problem with it is that they either have free songs that require crediting the artist, or they charge you $98 per song. I'm not going to charge my client $98 for using one of these songs, and surely I'm not going to sacrifice that amount from my money. If they want that store to be successful they have to do different licensing for different projects. $98 may be nothing in the production of a big budget movie, it may be small change in the production of a TV show, but it's a lot of money for a wedding videographer.

[Sebastian Alvarez]

Originally Posted by Steve House

Check out the SmartSounds library ( smartsounds.com ). You can audition tracks online and their SonicFire PRo software is a great tool for editing, timing, and remixing their tracks. You can purchase tracks individually online and they are always having special deals from their CD collection ... like right now they have several "6-packs" of 6 disks of 10 tracks or so each for $99.

Actually it's smartsound.com and it's not bad, but I'm a little confused because the sample you can hear on each song lasts about 30 seconds. Is that just the sample or are those tracks just 30 seconds long? I would think not, but it doesn't clarify that anywhere.

[Allan Black]

Sebastian, all the SS tracks are different lengths, it's worthwhile doing their on line instructional programs so as to get a good grounding and not get a bad impression from the start. My experience tells me, one marketing problem I think they suffer slightly from is having 2 names .. Smartsound AND Sonicfire Pro .. SS is the library and SF pro is their program.

We use Sonicfire Pro 5, it's excellent with patented technology, SS use Hollywood studio musos and you can get your music in 8 track form to custom tailor it as required.

But all the online music companies started slow gradually ironing out the bugs and building their libraries. It was too much for some, even Sony had strife licensing some patented technology from Smartsound. Sony have now discontinued their libraries.

IMO Vimeo will also go through the hoops to get their loops.

Cheers.

[Steve House]

Originally Posted by Sebastian Alvarez

Actually it's smartsound.com and it's not bad, but I'm a little confused because the sample you can hear on each song lasts about 30 seconds. Is that just the sample or are those tracks just 30 seconds long? I would think not, but it doesn't clarify that anywhere.

Sorry for the typo in the name. As Allan said, the actual cuts you purchase are of varying lengths but the raw cut is only the starting point. They're kind of like loops in some respects. Loops are usually just one instrument - bass guitar, ride cymbal, etc - and last just a bar or two. You repeat them in the tracks to build up to length and prepare multiple tracks with the various instrumentation you're going to mix to assemble the final composition. In contrast, Smartsounds cuts are both longer than loops and fully instrumented but they're still designed to be raw material to be used with the SonicFire software to produce the final track rather than just being dropped into your project 'as-is.' When you drop the cut into the track in SonicFire, the length that it initially goes in at is just the starting point. Then you adjust it to the length you need it to be and as you do so, the software actually 're-composes' the cut according to coding built into the original clip so the resulting cut is musically sound. Each cut has a number of mixes coded into it so you can have, say, a cut that you've adjusted to a length of 1min, 37sec, 16frames start with 15 seconds of a full orchestral mix, then duck down in level and instrumentation to a mix appropriate to sit behind voice-over for 30 seconds, then come back up to full intensity but with brass emphasized for the next 22 seconds and a cymbal hit added at 12 seconds, 6 frames into that segment to coincide with an event on the screen, etc etc etc

[Sebastian Alvarez]

So basically the tracks are the length that you hear in the sample on their website, but then you have to use their software to extend the same thing, only changing some things so it doesn't sound like a loop? The songs seem to be higher quality -musically speaking- than the ones I got in those Footage Firm discs, but still paying $30 for a song and then having to spend more time working on it doesn't seem like what I need. Besides, their songs are so short that if I have to repeat those over and over, even with variations in instruments, it would still be too repetitive. If I have to work on creating something I'd rather do it with Sony Acid, where I would have more freedom, but still it seems like I would spend too much time with it. I just would like to find royalty free versions of nice love songs that are about 4-5 minutes long and not $100 per song like some places.

[Steve House]

Okay, so you have a love song that runs 3:32. But when you edit the scene that you'll you want to use it with, the strongest images with the cuts in the perfect places for the pacing and mood you want to obtain results in a scene that is 00:02:47:24. What do you do now? Recut the picture? Cut off the song short of its end? What? The advantage of the smartsound system is you can work the Hollywood way, where music is composed to picture after picture lock.

[Sebastian Alvarez]

I see your point, but the Hollywood way is a real life band, or a composer working from a large collection of loops that spends his whole day working on that. I'm not saying that smartsound.com is not useful, but it's not what I'm looking for right now. I would prefer to spend my time editing video and doing marketing rather than re-editing canned music.

[Steve House]

Originally Posted by Sebastian Alvarez

I see your point, but the Hollywood way is a real life band, or a composer working from a large collection of loops that spends his whole day working on that. I'm not saying that smartsound.com is not useful, but it's not what I'm looking for right now. I would prefer to spend my time editing video and doing marketing rather than re-editing canned music.

That's my point. You've edited your video and when you look at the timeline the segment runs 00:03:37:15. You've selected My Love Song as the smartsounds clip you want to use. When you drop it into the timeline, you tell SonicFire, either the standalone software or the add-in for your video editor, that you want it to run 00:03:37:15. (It speaks timecode.) The software automatically adjusts it to the length you've specified AND simultaneously rearranges the phrases within the song so it has a musically proper beginning, middle, and end within exactly that duration. No further editing required unless you want to remix. Took me longer to type this reply than it does to do it.

[Sebastian Alvarez]

Oh OK, now it makes more sense. I might give it a try.