Free sound & music sources

[Master-Athmos]

If you're looking for music or sound effects for your game have a look at those sites:

Music:

• http://www.newgrounds.com/audio/
  When into Techno, DNB and stuff like that I found the Newgrounds Audio Portal to be a good source (ParagonX9 etc.). It of course features other genres too...
• http://www.ocremix.org/
  Remixed game music. Third party usability probably is questionable...
• http://www.musopen.com/
  PD music, mostly instrumental.
• http://www.jamendo.com/
  - lots of CC-by-SA, -NC and what not. You have to check the particular licensing though, since almost every possible CC license is covered.
• http://altermusique.org/
  French site featuring free albums & songs.
• http://freemusicarchive.org/
  Lots of free music from various genres and artists.
• http://www.incompetech.com/m/c/royalty-free/
  Music by Kevin MacLeod covering various genres.
• http://www.openmusicarchive.org/
  Music from different gernes and artists.
• http://opsound.org/index.php
  Yet another site for music under the Creative Commons license.
• http://www2.fanaticalproductions.net:8080/
  (Metal) music by Marc Pullen.

Sounds:

An excellent resource site would be Freesound.org which features tons of sounds. Other sources would be:

• http://www.pdsounds.org/
• http://freepats.zenvoid.org/
• http://www.johannespinter.com/inu/ljudbank.htm
• http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sound_samples
• http://www.soundsnap.com/

[SinbadEV]

http://www.ocremix.org

More music than you can shake a stick at, Not For Profit attribution license, original artist retains rights to material so can be contacted to request a For Profit lisence.

http://www.ocremix.org/info/Content_Policy

[Master-Athmos]

Aren't most of the songs there actual game remixes and aren't those songs a grey area in law? Not sure how this differs from country to country but we shouldn't create a successor to the TA IP problem...

[Neddie]

For a cover one would have to obtain a digital license, and use would be limited to the number paid for. Remixes are in an even less advantageous position - if you can establish that mere sampling is involved, then you could claim it as an original product, but some people in the music industry regard remixes as thievery and others see them as manipulated covers.

[Master-Athmos]

Yeah - I'm still surprised that Square Enix tolerates the remixes of their games as they usually shut everything down that remakes anything they have published...

[Evil4Zerggin]

http://www.musopen.com/

PD music, mostly instrumental.

[Sindwiller]

Jamendo - lots of CC-by-SA, -NC and what not. You have to check the particular licensing though, since almost every possible CC license is covered.

[imbaczek]

sticky somewhere please, perhaps in the art forum.

[Sindwiller]

I think it'd be a good idea if we make this thread a list of general resources regarding sound and music.

As for sounds in general, I recommend pdsounds.org, which recently died and was resurrected with the help of the FGD community.

If you're a musician or you just want to record some sounds, there's a Wiki with a lot of articles on that called WikiRecording. A list of free/FOSS software for that purpose can be found here. Same place, some audio/music links.

[CarRepairer]

[*]http://www.ocremix.org/
Remixed game music. Third party usability probably is questionable...

I have a chunk of this collection on my cell phone. It's awesome. I don't think most of these are sampled, just covered.

[Neddie]

[*]http://www.ocremix.org/
Remixed game music. Third party usability probably is questionable...

I have a chunk of this collection on my cell phone. It's awesome. I don't think most of these are sampled, just covered.

Still not free.

[SinbadEV]

Yeah, for some reason you can publicly perform Covers but you need a license from the original author to distribute a recording of a Cover... I'm not entirely sure where this fit's into copyright law but it seems to be a generally held assumption.

[Sindwiller]

Just noticed that there is a Audio section in the resources article in the FGD Wiki

http://wiki.freegamedev.net/index.php/F ... rces#Audio

[Peet]

Marc Pullen's work is all free to use I think - nice generic metal. He's the guy that made the sauerbraten soundtrack. I'd link to his site but it seems to be down.

[Master-Athmos]

So - I changed the opening post to feature the latest music sources just as adding sites for sound effects. Thanks for giving all those good links & hints!

[smoth]

The problem with adding music to a spring project is we have to use the bloated OGG format and it would be imposing our individual tastes on the end users.

Personaly I just want cd audio support so I can setup pre-programmed event driven lists with configurable playset so users can just listen to what they want instead of me forcing jpop on them, because that is what I would want to listen to.

as it stands users can just play mp3s/whatever in the bg as it is and I am fine with that, no extra space and no forced listening.

[Argh]

bloated OGG format

Er... it's barely larger than an MP3 of comparable quality, if you compress it.

The longest song in P.U.R.E.'s current catalog is 7:30 (quite long by pop standards) and it's 10MB in size, compressed. A decent-quality MP3 won't be a lot smaller, OGG's compression algorithm's actually pretty good.

[smoth]

considering how shit the rest of our sound files and art are, I really think it is asinine to include a 10 meg song of EITHER format. 128khz is fine.

[Argh]

You can cut down even further, if you want. I cut until the compression was noticeable to me. And in the context of a game whose demo weighs in at a couple of hundred megabytes and whose full version is about a gigabyte... 10 megs is a drop in the bucket.

I'm not sure what you mean in general, though- 22kHz mono WAV is used even in high-end commercial games like Fallout 3, and Spring supports 44kHz mono and 44kHz stereo, although some Linux builds have had issues with them in the past (this may have been fixed by the newer build of OpenAL we're using now).

We now have fully-3D sound which is easily (if lengthily) configurable by writing some Lua, we can spawn just about any sound event we want, wherever we want, with stereo effects and even with doppler (although until we get seamless repeating loops, the doppler's still not quite what it should be).

What do you feel that Spring's missing atm, in terms of sound support? The only thing that I personally wish that we had (engine-side) besides seamless loops is that I'd like to attach said loops (with doppler) to weapon projectiles, for a true 3D feel on rockets, etc.

Anyhow, this is somewhat of a derail, but if you'd like to talk about ways that the current sound-system can be improved, ask a Moderator to split.

[Sindwiller]

Well, MP3 is cool... except for the proprietary status and all the patents resolving around it. OGG/Vorbis is a good sound codec as is. Besides Vorbis, there's also cool stuff like FLAC, which is a lossless compression codec for audio, and OGG/Speex, an effective speech codec which is being used in Unreal Engine 3 based games (Gears of War, Unreal Tournament 3, etc.) and also in the TS/Ventrilo-like program Mumble (google it)