5 Sites For Royalty Free Music

Here Are 5 Resources For Royalty Free Music,    
January 24, 2012, By Joshua Lockhart, from MakeUseOf.com

A while back, we received a question on MakeUseOf Answers asking where in the world one can get royalty free music. Naturally, as someone who is constantly searching for this Holy Grail, I jumped on it.

So, dear MakeUseOf readers, I felt that this is a question worthy enough to expand upon. I’m quite sure that some of you out there are wondering where to find royalty free music whether you’re a videomaker, a game developer, or one of those neo-artist stage performance poets that uses a combination of visual imagery, weird music, and the occasional bit of innocent nudity. So with that being said, I’m here to bring you some quality royalty free music.

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Vimeo Music Store

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The Vimeo Music Store is a brilliant tool to use when in search for music for your videos. Although there are several free items available via the Creative Commons, there are actually a few songs that you can pay for either personal use ($1.99) or for commercial use ($98). The Vimeo Music Store is a nice consolidated catalog of music from all genres, and the best part about it is that each song on the store is available to use for your videos. This way, you do not have to do as much digging. However, you will have to lurk around if you want to find free royalty free songs, and it’s a little harder if you want to use them commercially without paying a dime.

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SoundCloud

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I recently discovered the beauty of SoundCloud, and the fact is this – they have an entire section of their site devoted to the Creative Commons. What does that mean for you? Well, my friend, it means there is a ton of music out there waiting on you to use it in a personal project. SoundCloud also offers quite a bit of search classifications, so you can find songs with CC licenses that allow for commercial use or without the share alike option. It seems like a good deal to me, and I’ve been using their music for quite a few projects lately.

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Free Music Archive


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The Vimeo Music Store pulls some of their music from the Free Music Archive, but I decided to go ahead and throw it in as a separate entity for a couple of reasons. One, it seems like the Vimeo Music Store doesn’t include all of the songs on here, for it constantly updates. Two, it also seems like there is some differing information between the sites.
For instance, I used a song that I got from the Vimeo Music store for free, and on their site, it said I could only use it for noncommercial purposes. However, when I saw it on the Free Music Archive, it said I could use it for commercial purposes with attribution. Either way, both are excellent sources of music, and I would recommend this site for sure. Granted, I cannot guarantee everything on this site will be available for you to use.



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Incompetech

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We couldn’t have this article without mentioning Kevin MacLeod, the mastermind behind Incompetech. MacLeod’s website offers quite a bit of music for your royalty free needs, and it is absolutely fantastic. He does offer a PayPal donation system (as does AudioNautix, actually), so if you feel the need to support him, you can do so. However, his music is great for whatever you need, and there is nothing else I can really say except that you should go give it a listen.


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AudioNautix

After submitting my answer to MUO answers (which included the Vimeo Music Store), I went back to see if anybody else had brought anything to the table. Fortunately, someone did, and that was MUO reader ha14, who suggested AudioNautix, another site for royalty free music. The site offers everything including tracks for cinematic works and documentaries, but what i really liked about it was simply how easy it was to understand the usage rights of this music. You can pretty much use it for anything, so… go do that. Right now.

Conclusion

These are simply my top four picks for royalty free music (with ha14′s tacked on), and each of them have quality stuff. You normally won’t see a whole lot of good music that you can use in projects, and each of these resources has a different flavor for everyone.
What other royalty free music resources do you use? What do you like or not like about the ones mentioned here?

Source: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/5-resources-royalty-free-music/

Manage And Play Internet Radio In Google Chrome

I have made the full switch to listening exclusively to Internet Radio stations many years ago.

The core reasons? Accessibility while working on the PC, less ads and talking while songs are playing, and better recording possibilities (see our StreamWriter review for an excellent program that can be used for that purpose.

I usually use desktop media players like AIMP3 to listen to Internet Radio stations, as it is a lot more comfortable than having to keep a streaming page open all the time in the web browser. That’s especially true if you have to restart the browser every now and then.
Radio Player Live is an excellent Chrome extension that offers a great radio listening experience for Chrome users. First time users need to add at least one station to the extension before they start accessing the selected stations via the extension’s Chrome address bar button.





This is done on the extension’s page. A click on Add radio stations lists all the available options. Users can add a station from the gallery listing maintained by the extension developers, add stations from popular sites such as the Shoutcast directory or Digitally Imported, or add stations manually.





All stations from the gallery can be added with a single click of the mouse button. They list many terrestrial stations, like RTL and RTL2, Virgin Radio, BBC 1 to BBC 6 or .977.
Third party stations lead to websites from where the stations need to be added. The extension adds buttons next to each station on those sites which can be used to add the selected radio station to the extension.





A click on the Radio Player Live button loads an overlay prompt to add the selected station to the radio player. The station’s name, website, logo and category can be customized here.





The station can then be selected via the extension’s button in the Chrome interface. Stations can be sorted into categories for easier identification. You can do that when you add a station, or later on under Manage my stations in the program options.
Users who do not like the theme can modify it extensively in the options. From background and header text colors to borders, category names and srollbars. Nearly every visual aspect can be modified.

The player window itself displays a list of radio stations, the currently playing station, the volume, and pause and stop options. You can switch to another radio station with a click.
The program supports VLC and Windows Media Player plugins, but I was not able to get those to work in the Chrome browser. It is not clear from the description whether they are used to play the radio stations in the browser, or if the music is redirected to the desktop player from where they are then played.

Google Chrome users who like to listen to Internet radio while surfing should take a closer look at Radio Player Live.

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Source: http://www.ghacks.net/2012/01/30/manage-and-play-internet-radio-in-google-chrome/