Omnivorous Surfer

 There have often been times when I needed some music to add to a video, Photo Story 3 creation, or PowerPoint slide. If I didn't have the right style or sound, or if I wanted a clip to fit a short span, I found one website which often fit the bill, but that was about it. The advent of the Creative Commons license, however, has brought about some new alternatives. In finding music for projects, you have to be careful about giving students too may options, especially if they're like me. The less structured the site, the more time I spend listening to find just the right music. The first two sites listed provide a method of narrowing down your options, which helps. If you have some time, though, browsing through these can be kind of fun.

Freeplay Music has been around for a long time, and still does very well what it sets out to do: provide short clips for video productions. It presents a large number of instrumental selections in wide variety of styles and moods. Each composition is available in 10-, 15-, 20-, 30-, and 60-second clips, very useful for video broadcast productions. You can search by style (e.g. ambient, baroque, drum & bass, funk) or feel (e.g. building/tension, cinematic, driving, hopeful), or you can browse through albums.

A newer player is in the royalty-free music game is Jamendo. This site is not designed for video production but could easily serve as a source for background music. Jamendo is a venue for artists to share their compositions and performances for others to use and enjoy. You can browse by artist or album, or you can select a "radio" for your choice of style (e.g. metal, jazz, lounge). If you scroll to the bottom of the home page, you will see an option to search using tags. This may be the easiest way to filter the content to find what you're looking for. Each piece has a brief description to help you see if it might be what you need or want. I've heard some nice music here.

Moby Gratis is a section of moby.com "for independent and non-profit filmmakers, film students, and anyone in need of free music for their independent, non-profit film, video, or short." You simply browse the text list by title, play, and download. If you want to use any of the selections for commercial purposes, you can apply for a license; otherwise it's free. You do have to create an account for Moby Gratis, and it asks for a lot of information, including address; I suppose this is so they will have the information needed if you want to license a work. You have to guess the style of music by title, but, again, there is some nice music here, though this site has a much more limited selection than the previous 2. It is also entirely textual.

The last site for today is ccMixter , "a community music site featuring remixes licensed under Creative Commons where you can listen to, sample, mash-up, or interact with music in whatever way you want." To search for music you'll actually go to digg.ccMixter. I have not thoroughly browsed this site, but there seems to be a lot here. I really liked the first instrumental I listened to, and it was something I would use.

I know there are other sites, but this is more than enough for today! Happy listening...or searching.