People like to make money, and they do so by making stuff and selling it – so others need to buy it. Now, we don’t want to buy stuff or pay royalties, so if we’re working on a commission, we can’t just use anything we find on the internet, especially music. Unlike the BBC, we don’t have contracts with EMI, Warner and Sony, so to avoid legal action against us (Exeposé got not just one written warning last year, resulting in costs over a couple of hundred pounds), it is recommended to use “free” music.
All music is licensed under some sort of license, a very well-known free license is “CC”, short for Creative Commons. There are various types of CC-licenses, permitting remixes, use for commercial applications or just requiring credit where credit is due (which we should always do anyway).
Some well-known websites with CC-resources are listed below:
Music
- YouTube Audio Library
- Table Top Audio (CC-BY-NC)
- http://www.ektoplazm.com/
- http://www.jamendo.com
- http://freemusicarchive.org/
- http://incompetech.com/music/
- http://periskop.cc/
- http://netlabelism.com/
- http://basicsounds.ca/
- http://www.energostatic.com/
- http://www.freesfx.co.uk/music/
Sound Effects
- YouTube Audio Library
- http://www.freesound.org/browse/tags/sound-effects/
- http://www.freesfx.co.uk/
- http://www.grsites.com/archive/sounds/
- http://www.soundjay.com/
Images
Video
Fonts
Free Software Alternatives
Photoshop
3D Animation
- Blender
- Autodesk (for students free to use after registration; for 3D modelling/animation see Maya or 3ds)
Scriptwriting
- Adobe Story (free registration required)
- CeltX (Mac Only; free registration required – direct download)
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