Every so often I get asked about where to get music without breaking copyright. Creative Commons tagged music is a good start for me because it tells me immediately what I can do with the music (or video, picture etc) without having to ask the author.

Anyway here are some links to "free" sites. If you have more, please add a comment to this entry. Update:- because of this blog's inbuilt spam filter, posting a comment can sometimes be rejected. The trick appears to be to leave out the http:// part of the url, so just type in www.somewher.com

Music or things that make music...

Software Programs

Songsmith from MicroSoft generates musical accompaniment to match a singer’s voice. Just choose a musical style, sing into your PC’s microphone, and Songsmith will create backing music for you. Then share your songs online, or create your own music videos. You can download a trial version from http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/songsmith/

As an educator, you can download a free version if you sign into partners in learning... You can create an account by visiting http://partnersinlearningnetwork.com/Pages/default.aspx

and then visit  http://africa.partnersinlearningnetwork.com/Resources/Pages/ArticleViewer.aspx?listname=ToolsAndPrograms&itemid=23 to download the 100 megabyte file.

There are also some paid options and I have been a fan of SmartSound and Sonicfire for about 12 years.

Their music costs money, but you can remix, set in and ending points, highlight moods, emphasise instruments on their albums. For educational use, the cost is very reasonable, especially when they do a bulk sale of their single layer albums.

http://www.smartsound.com/

Other products that I have a passing acquaintence with are:

acid - http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/acidsoftware

garage band (on the macintosh) - http://www.apple.com/ilife/garageband/

Ask a professional...

Our own school of music has number of music experts. Andy Mison is available to discuss requirements and he can be contacted through the NT School of Music. There is a rumour that Andy will be launching a music and arts related blog in the near future.

Finally

Audicity which is open source and a great audio editor can be used to edit and mix music that you download from the web. http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

 

 

This entry was posted on July 28, 2010 at 9:06 AM and has received 346 views. There are currently 2 comments. Print this entry.