So, and if it is possible, what friendly softwares could you advise us for this type of workflow (always on PC/Windows)? Thank you again for your attention and your professional lighting.

The more control you have over the music, the more complex everything becomes. Many aspiring music producers become lost or give up due to the complexity of volume and location/spacialization of instruments otherwise known simply as "Mixing."

If you're really looking for something to keep it simple you want to minimize how much mixing you will have to do, and for that I would suggest a program like Fruity Loops Studio which unlike the name suggests, isn't just loops but professional and full production software, especially for beginners.

Fruity loops contains many visual feedback plugins which help to SEE the changes you are making to each instrument rather than just looking at a bunch of knobs and sliders.

Fruity Loops also contains many demo files and tutorial projects you can open up and examine to learn how everything works.

Another reason I recommend it is because the workflow is based on creating repeating loops and mixing them together rather than having to put everything manually onto a linear time frame. This makes the music a bit more intuitive and fun to make.

I grew up on Fruity Loops and although it does not give me control over my mixing as much as I would like, I still recommend it today.

Personally I use Ableton, but ableton is not as beginner friendly and frankly it's starting instrument library is pathetic.

Fruity Loops is better for an out of the box experience because it includes many powerful and unique synthesizers to get you started whereas Ableton and many other professional DAWs (Digital Audio Workstations) pretty much expect you to install your own synthesizers otherwise known as VSTi's.

VSTi instruments are compatable with most DAWs so if you download some and use them in Fruity Loops then eventually switch to another DAW, you can carry over your synths and still use them so it won't be a completely foreign experience.

My general advice to all new music producers would be to keep the volume down and turn your speakers up until you get a lot of practice. Then and only then would I recommend experimenting with raising the volume or using tools on your instruments to make them louder in the software itself.

How about, do you know anything about not necessarily putting songs into games, but instruments, and the game will play the instruments to create songs while you're playing the game to make the filesize of the audio as small as possible

In the early days of video games, most consoles or computers would have a dedicated sound card to control the different noises it could make. Different sound cards would have different numbers of "voices"—essentially different channels—and different menu of waves those channels could issue simultaneously. These limitations ultimately defined the iconic sounds of the gadgets they were inside. (Source: popularmechanics.com/technology/audio/a17684/8-bit-guy-vintage-sound/)

MIDI evolved out of this to create a more uniform approach to digital music creation. MIDI is an arrangement of musical notes and codes representing what instruments they should be played on, and there is a library of instruments which correspond with modern MIDI that can be used to play music in your game.

However this limits you to the predefined instruments in the General MIDI Library and they definitely do not have a modern sound to them haha.

A better approach is to compose music and use an audio container such as .ogg vorbis to compress the music to a small file size. Even modern music can be made into incredibly small files if you're willing to sacrifice quality.

Most game making engines support .ogg as well, so that is what I'd recommend. A tool such as Audacity or izotope RX Audio can be used to compress audio in .ogg format.

Top 5 Community Questions:

 

1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

------------- Questions Will Appear As They Are Submitted By The Community -------------

Hey guys, 

I am currently writing a few audio guides for game developers and music producers but I am having trouble coming up with good topics to address, so what better way then to ask you guys yourselves!

Please tell me, if there was only one thing you could learn about the usage of music, sound effects or general audio in video games or music production in general, what would it be?

And if there are a few more questions you have, please list them as well! I want to see which questions routinely pop up in the community over and over so I can address the top 5-10 questions everyone has and write a guide on it!

Thanks for contributing your questions!

There is a contact form at the bottom of the page in the link I provided above. You can also get in touch via email at adminmky@jordanwinslow.me but I prefer using the contact form on the page above so I get all the important information about the project.

Thanks!

You read that correctly. For a limited time, I am producing custom soundtracks for FREE for (inspired) Filmmakers and Game Developers. Click the link for more details.

https://jordanwinslow.me/free-music-soundtrack-for-film-video-game/

I like your music the most out of everyone else I saw post music in this forum

Wow, thank you very much! That makes me happy to hear :-)

(Listen While You Read)

https://soundcloud.com/jordanwinslow

I WAS WHAT THEY CALLED A “TROUBLED” CHILD.

I was the class clown.

It seemed to the faculty at Lumpkin County Elementary that I could not focus on any work they gave me and it was suggested I may have something wrong with my brain.

As time went on, I became very well acquainted with the elementary school principal. I remember that office room more than any other room in the school.

Staring at the clock, watching the minutes of my life tick away while waiting to be lectured for the 300th time about why I shouldn’t purposely fall out of my chair in the middle of a teacher’s lecture or put tacks in her chair in an attempt to make the classroom laugh.

They didn’t find it amusing.

I was put on experimental ADHD medication which gave me hallucinations. I saw numerous doctors, and long story short I was falsely diagnosed with Tourette’s syndrome and placed in special education because the teachers simply couldn’t deal with me.

So I’ve always been a little “different.”

They should have been asking how I was keeping up with all of the other students without studying, doing any homework or seemingly participating at all in class studies.

Lumpkin County Elementary School is located in Dahlonega, GA and is so little-known that I can’t even find a photo of it on a Google search.

The current Board of Education for Lumpkin County. Hopefully they have improved their methodology for determining which children end up in special education.

As a child, I loved being in special education. You didn’t have to do any work.

I could play on the computers all day and teach myself whatever I wanted on the internet. I had no homework and basically got a free pass to do whatever I desired.

But after years in special education, I decided of my own volition that I didn’t belong there.

Doctors came again, this time to give me an IQ test.

I don’t know what I scored but I know the narrative did a 180. They stopped calling me “challenged” and started calling me “gifted.”

I was immediately reinstated into “normal” classes in 5th grade where I continued my education, taking advanced placement courses for college credit in whatever interested me.

It wasn’t long before I was hacking into my high school’s computer network and utilizing exploits in their infrastructure to create undeletable folders on the root of their network called “LOL” and “OMGWTFM8.”

I guess two things became pretty clear about who I am. I did not like being told what I could and couldn’t do by authoritative figures and when left to pursue my own interests I could learn things that take the average person many months in the span of a few days.

How many people do you know taught themselves C++ computer code for fun in their spare time when they were 14 years old because the school they were at didn’t offer advanced courses?

I’m not trying to show off here, please don’t misunderstand. I don’t think I’m some prodigal genius, that isn’t the point of this story.

I’m actually venting a little because…I mean, look what they did to me and imagine how many other children went through similar circumstances in tiny little towns like Dahlonega.

Imagine if I had my talents cultivated from a young age instead of being treated like a mere nuisance and stowed away with the developmentally challenged.

But anyway, enough about that.

Let’s talk about music!

HOW I BECAME ADDICTED TO MUSIC PRODUCTION

Rewind. It was the year 2002, I was 12 and I had stumbled across an amateur music, film & video game production website called Newgrounds.com which still exists today.

I loved watching and voting on content on Newgrounds so much that it inspired me to try my hand at creating videos myself. Long story short, a monkey could probably draw better than me, so I decided to try my hand at music production.

As I began releasing songs and promoting them on the community forums I was flooded with feedback, both from people my age, and people with far more experience than myself.

Each time I would receive a 5-star review, (whether or not my music actually deserved it at the time) my young brain released endorphins and I became incredibly excited; I was hooked.

Whether or not this was healthy is up for debate.

It got to the point where I became so addicted to this feedback loop of releasing songs and getting comments that between the years 2004 and 2005 I released over 500 songs on Newgrounds.com when I should have been studying, socializing, exercising….eating….you get the picture.

PROOF OF MY ADDICTION

Tens of Thousands of Downloads and Reviews by the Wonderful Community of Newgrounds in my Childhood Helped me Perfect my Craft and… Develop Somewhat of an Addiction.

TO COLLEGE

So here I was, not even old enough to qualify as a teenager, teaching myself music production and releasing thousands of songs on the internet while other children were doing their homework, going to the mall or theater together, etc.

This constant stream of positive and negative reviews became the tool with which I measured my self-worth and musical capabilities.

I released around 1500 songs on Newgrounds in the next 4 years, gradually learning the ins-and-outs of electronic music production with no formal training, purely by trial and error.

It was this unconventional upbringing and my, perhaps unhealthy addiction, which would become the foundation of my music career today.

After I graduated High School I was deceived (like most 18-year-old millennials) into abandoning my dreams and pursuing a “safe” career.

I moved to New York and immediately got myself into 18 thousand dollars of debt on a Computer Science Bachelor’s program with Rochester Institute of Technology.

Here is where you might begin to notice a trend…

ABANDONING THE SAFE CHOICE

In my downtime between classes, rather than study for my Calculus exam or memorize historical dates for my WWII course, I would sneak into the “Music Major ONLY” section of the college and spend hours each day teaching myself scales and chords.

I made a serious error. I didn’t want to be 40 years old, looking back on my life and wondering what would have happened if I had just stuck with my passion for music.

Did I seriously want to spend the rest of my life sitting in a cubicle somewhere, bug testing programs for some corporation that viewed me as an expendable resource?

I decided to finish my Associate’s degree and abandon my Bachelor’s program (to the dismay of my family) and pursue my passions, rather than the safe choice.

WHAT HAPPENED NEXT WAS A SERIES OF TRAGEDIES, CHANCE ENCOUNTERS, AND ONCE-IN-A-LIFETIME OPPORTUNITIES.

My very first production studio in Los Angeles. I couldn’t even afford a chair.

Stopping by the Grand Canyon on our drive from North Carolina to Los Angeles, California to become “rockstars.”

I sold my car to pay for a modest set of production equipment and moved to Florida to team up with my best friend from high school with the plans to release an electronic music album with him as the vocalist and me as…..everything else.

(Here’s what it sounded like) soundcloud.com/love-song-for-her/sets/me

But here is where I learned the hard way that you cannot rely on other people to achieve your dreams.

He became homesick and left Florida to move back to his hometown leaving me with no choice but to abandon my apartment and make another plan.

It was then that I met a charismatic man who had discovered my music through the internet and wanted to meet with me for lunch.

As things go, we did perhaps the most stereotypical thing country boys from North Carolina do: We formed a 3 person Electronic Rock band with the intentions of moving to Los Angeles California to become “rock stars!”

We sold our possessions (again), saved up an irresponsibly small amount of money and drove for 3 days across the United States in a car with no air conditioning to move to Los Angeles with absolutely no plan whatsoever.

OOPS.

A little more than half a year into us finding our first apartment on the corner of Mountain & Lake Avenue in Pasadena, it happened.

Our guitarist ended up abandoning the project to move back home. This is not a pleasant reoccurring theme to experience, let me tell you.

Suddenly rent was split 2 ways instead of 3. I couldn’t afford to eat. I couldn’t afford to pay rent.

I was working 2 jobs and because I had sold my car to pay for music equipment I had to skateboard for miles to the Metro station where I would commute for 2 hours to Hollywood where I worked as a Telemarketer and a Door to Door salesman.

MY FIRST BREAK

I don’t know if you have ever worked as a Door to Door salesman in California, but if you’d like me to sum the experience up for you…

It’s quite similar to the experience of running out of gas in the middle of a dangerous neighborhood in 110 degrees weather and having to knock on everyone’s door with a sweat-covered hand to try to convince them to give you money.

It was then that I received my first break, but I won’t call it lucky.

I received a response to a craigslist ad I had put up from a man named Kim Bullard who I agreed to meet for some sushi and to discuss business.

I did not know it at the time but the man I was speaking with was the keyboardist for the Elton John band, and he contacted me to help him produce music for his daughter, Katy Rose.

Not only did this wonderful man pay me substantially more than I had ever been paid before (to him it was probably nothing,) but he introduced me to more and more clients via word of mouth.

He did not know it, but working with Kim Bullard may have single-handedly prevented me from becoming homeless.

FROM A BASEMENT IN NORTH CAROLINA TO ALCON SLEEPING GIANT’S CONFERENCE ROOM

A few years went by and suddenly I was in a room with Ken Calliet, the founder of Sleeping Giant music group (now Alcon Sleeping Giant,) the company behind the music for the Hunger Games films, the new Blade Runner movie, and many others.

I guess the point of all this is to say, in incredibly long-winded fashion, that I am dedicated to my goals and I will never give up on my dreams.

Today I have produced electronic music for over 15 artists across the world, my music has been featured in short films, 2 video game productions, and countless non-profit video productions.

Despite all of this, I’m still not where I want to be in the music industry so I decided it was time to finally put myself out there, design this website and start meeting like-minded people!

SO, WHY SHOULD YOU WORK WITH ME?

A Few Reasons.

1. I want to be friends, not coworkers. I have spent too much time being a recluse and I know that isn’t the path to success in this industry. If you work with me, you are working with a friend who will treat your project as important as his own.

2. Your artistic vision will shine through our work together. My unconventional education has led me to learn a vast array of music techniques I can apply to capture your unique vision whether you’re an electro fanatic or in love with acoustic instrumentation. (or both!)

3. My dedication to your success does not end when the song is finished. I can help you create a website, distribute your music online, advise you on marketing and much more. After all if you succeed, so do I.

4. If you work with me, you’re working with someone who genuinely desires to improve the world and will eventually reinvest all profits into accomplishing this goal.

HOW I INTEND TO IMPROVE THE WORLD

Crazy, I know. But if you shoot for the stars and fail then at the least you will hit the moon.

And this isn’t just an idea, I already laid out the blueprint here: https://antipropaganda.today/philosophy/how-the-another-hero-social-movement-will-change-the-world/

Whether you agree with me in my goals to reinvest my profits into the utilization of vertical farming, aeroponics, geodesic biodomes, LED technology and diversified farming to help end starvation in the world…

Or utilizing solar, tidal and wind energy generation projects to end war over oil…

And whether you believe decentralized blockchain-based social media and voting systems are the revolution which will guide us into a new era of freedom, prosperity and equality where all human beings can thrive rather than merely survive…

You are probably starting to get the picture that I am either a genius or a deluded madman. (I hope for the former)

THANKS FOR READING!

If you read this far then you probably know more about me than most of my family members and many of my friends.

Thank you so much for taking your time to read this.

Get in touch with me! I’m not just on here for business, I’d love to be friends. Maybe you’ll feel inspired to tell me your story.

Jordan Winslow

Electronic Music Producer, Sound Engineer & Composer

https://jordanwinslow.me

https://anotherhero.stream

https://antipropaganda.today

Hey guys, I'm Jordan - Your New Electronic Music Producer Friend!

I know the best way to start a new friendship is by helping people out, so I'm extending my 14+ years of professional experience to passionate game developers who have interesting ideas!

In fact, I already have a large catalog of free commercially usable electronic music I am giving away (https://jordanwinslow.me/royaltyfreemusic), and I am growing that library by helping game developers such as yourself!

Let me know a bit about your project and what role music will play in it, and if I am inspired I will gladly help you out to get a custom soundtrack scored, free of charge.

Licensing:

Since this is for free I require "Music By:" credits and I retain all copyright over my music and will be listing it for free download in my Royalty Free Music Catalog so other developers like you can benefit from it!

If you'd like to profit share and you can guarantee steam greenlight or have experience releasing titles, we can discuss exclusive licensing for your project.

P.S. My favorite game genre is Horror! So if you're making a horror game, definitely reach out!

If you would like to get to know me more and learn how I overcame a failed education system and a false diagnosis to become a successful music producer you can read my story here: https://jordanwinslow.me/mystory

Thanks for reading! Let me know if you have any ideas on how I can improve it.

So you're a filmmaker entering post-production on your film, a game developer working on music and audio triggers or perhaps a YouTuber wanting to enhance your videos. You need SFX and a music soundtrack but you might not have the budget to hire a professional composer or audio engineer.

The question is: Can you still have a great commercial soundtrack and great SFX for your project utilizing only free resources?

Definitely.

Quick story about why I am writing this article:

My career is in electronic music production, but I also love game design and have always wanted to create my own video game, so 2 years ago I decided to produce my first interactive horror visual novel.

I was designing everything in-house: music, SFX, graphics, writing, everything. Many of you reading this are probably quite similar to me and are doing most of the work for your project yourself.

I could handle the music, the writing, and the code, but there was no avoiding the obvious fact that I was terrible at drawing and I did not have the field-recording equipment necessary to record my own sound effects.

I also did not have the budget to hire an audio engineer or an artist to provide me with SFX and the artwork needed for the game, so I had a dilemma.

How do I immerse the player in my story without quality sound effects, artwork, and no budget to pay for them?

Well, I did what I always do when I have a problem that seems impossible to overcome:

I asked the internet.

I spent days researching online and long story short I found dozens of websites providing free commercially-usable resources for my project.

And imagine my surprise when a few of these free resources...didn't suck! Not only did I end up finishing my game without spending a penny, but I could still sell it!

So I got to thinking, what about filmmakers, game developers, and YouTubers who already have great video and artwork but need great music and SFX? Are there equally-powerful free music libraries out there to search and download from?

I did my research and once again found some incredible resources that I am going to share with you now!

And not just that, but I'm going to help you incorporate and edit these free resources so they don't sound like you just downloaded them off random websites online.

Here's what we are going to cover:

• Where to obtain free, commercially usable music & SFX for your project without sacrificing the quality of your end-product
• How to edit music and SFX you downloaded from widely different sources to create a unified soundtrack that works with your project
• How to create loops, fade-ins, fade-outs and layer audio to immerse the audience
• Licensing, what it means and what restrictions you have when using these resources (not many, I promise)
• How to change the format of your audio to work with your software
• Where to find volunteers or paid professionals if you can't find what you need

So without boring you to death, let's get started with the best 9 websites to download free, commercially-usable music & SFX!

TOP 5 FREE COMMERCIALLY USABLE MUSIC LIBRARIES:

(For SFX, Keep Scrolling)

https://jordanwinslow.me/royaltyfreemusic - My Personal Library of Hundreds of Electronic & Orchestral Soundtracks Arranged by Category for Free Download - License: Free Commercial Use With Attribution (See Terms of Service on Website)

As I said before, I have been producing electronic music for over 14 years now, 5 years of which it has been my primary source of income. So I wanted to put together my own free resource for others to benefit from! These are some of my absolute best soundtracks, many of which are loopable. And I spent many days organizing them by category and mood to make it easier for you to find what you're looking for! And the best thing is, all of the tracks can be listened to without even leaving the page and can be easily downloaded in 1 click!

https://icons8.com/music/ - Incredibly Well-Sorted, Professional Library of Hundreds of Songs from Various Artists - License: “Free for a Link” (See Website)

Don’t be fooled by this company’s origin: They started off as graphic designers who made icons, thus Icons8. But they have evolved and got their hands on a rather large music library of various artists who have been curated by their team. Naturally, when a library is curated, it is subjective and therefore might not be to your tastes if you disagree with how they select their tracks for inclusion on their website, but it can’t hurt to take a look at their gallery since it is so incredibly well-sorted!

https://incompetech.com/music - A Classic Library of a Few Hundred Songs Ranging from Classic Rock to Jazz - License: Primarily Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

Incompetech has been around for quite some time and is recommended by many other bloggers because it provides a convenient category system. Unfortunately, the tracks are not organized by mood or tonal characteristics other than genre, so you will find tracks with the instruments you are looking for, but it may take some digging to find the appropriate mood you are looking for.

http://dig.ccmixter.org/free - A Massive Library of Non-Categorized Music Submitted by Various Artists - License: Primarily Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

Unfortunately dig cc mixter, though a MASSIVE resource with tons of great tracks, is not a great place to find music in the specific genre you are looking for as there are no categories and no search functions to speak of. If you are willing to spend the time looking through thousands of tracks though, you will find a few hidden gems on here that will fit perfectly in your project!

https://www.joshwoodward.com/- 200+ Primarily Acoustic & Electric Guitar Driven Songs - License: Commercial Use With Attribution (See Website for Terms)

The best part about Josh Woodward’s free commercially usable library is that he has tagged each and every song with different moods, themes, and styles to make it very easy for Filmmakers, Game Developers & Artists to search through tracks to find songs in the mood they are looking for!

Honorable Mention: https://www.partnersinrhyme.com/pir/free_music_loops.shtml - A Little Over 100 Free Unsorted Music Loops - License: Free for a “Thanks” or With Attribution (Vague, See Terms on Website)

This library is more of a last resort as the tracks are unsorted and not as high quality as others on this list, however free is free and these tracks would be suitable for app developers or creators who are looking for this type of sound.

TOP 3 FREE COMMERCIALLY USABLE SFX LIBRARIES:

https://www.zapsplat.com/sound-effect-categories/ - 27,000+ Searchable Sound Effects Recorded by Professionals - License: Free Commercial Use With Attribution

ZapSplat is by far my favorite free SFX resource. When I first discovered their website it had far fewer audio files and a much less appealing logo design. It appears they are dedicated to growth because they have completely redesigned their branding and added thousands of audio clips to their website! I personally used this resource in the development of my Horror Visual Novel titled “The Watchers.”

https://www.soundeffectsplus.com - Over 5000 Free Sound Effects Sorted by 16 Categories - License: Free Commercial Use With Attribution (See Website for More Details)

Soundeffects+ offers a large library sorted by the categories visible in the screenshot above. See something you’re looking for? Click the link and go check it out. Otherwise, keep scrolling!

https://www.videvo.net/royalty-free-sound-effects/freeclips/yes/ - 400 Free Sound Effects Sorted by Over 20 Categories - License: Complicated,  each sound effect has it’s own license and it varies. Check each sound page for the license.

Videvo is primarily a stock video provider with many free video clips, but they are also breaking into sound as well and have an expanding library of 440 clips which isn’t much but they are very well sorted so it should be easy to find something unique for your project. Make sure you check their licensing page as their licensing is quite complex compared to other websites.

In the above 9 websites, you should be able to obtain all of the sound effects and music for your project as long as you are willing to put in the time filtering and searching through these libraries to find what you are looking for.

It may seem like a daunting task, but I have done it personally myself in my game development and have had great success!

My suggestion to you is download anything that sounds interesting to you at the time, even if you are unsure if you can use it in your project or not, and copy-paste the license information into a .txt file so you don’t forget to give proper attribution.

Part 2: How to Choose the Right Music & SFX for Each Scene, and How to Edit Audio to Achieve Your Goals

Once you have a selection of songs or SFX for your project it's time to edit. Since most of you will be using many different types of software I am only going to cover how to edit music in 3rd party FREE software, namely Audacity.

Don't knock it, Audacity is very powerful software and unless you're considering a career in audio engineering, music production, sound design or mixing, this is probably the only tool you'll ever need.

If you want more professional audio editing tools I highly suggest iZotope's RX6 software as it allows you to do incredible things such as take backgrounds out of one scene and move them into another, repair poor recordings and dubbing, and more.

How to loop music that wasn't originally recorded as a loop:

To achieve this the easiest method is to create a soft fade-in and fade-out on the track. You can experiment with different values but 1-2 seconds on each end usually suffices unless the music is louder or more complex, then you can try up to 4 seconds on each end or even more for atmospheric loops.

Here is an easy to follow video tutorial:

How to make everything sound cohesive, as if everything was designed specifically for your project:

Keep in mind, layering audio is an incredibly easy, yet very powerful tool at your disposal. You can loop one audio track while another one continues to play underneath it to keep the player from noticing the loop. You can even create elaborate scenes with chattering people, blowing wind, ambient tones, and musical accompaniment.

All of these types of atmospheres can be downloaded at the above free resources!

It is important to consider the stylistic and tonal changes of the music you downloaded when switching from one song to another. Don't just go from a percussive action track straight into a somber atmospheric melody.

Transitioning is key: utilize fade-ins and fade-outs during most, if not all of your audio changes so the experience draws the audience further into your story rather than taking their focus off the screen and into the audio.

Oh yeah, and...

Epic Music Does Not Make a Boring Scene More Epic!

I think there is a huge problem in the video game industry specifically (filmmakers don't scoff, it's a problem in your industry too, but perhaps less pronounced) where game developers think if they make the music louder and louder and more and more epic it will somehow make the game more fun or the experience more immersive.

Well, it doesn't.

Many times have I been playing through a game or watching a film where the audio is 10X more dramatic than what is happening on screen and it makes me just want to mute it or turn it down. This is not the experience you want to give your audience, trust me.

Consider the emotion of every scene before you place any music and ensure that listening to the music by itself gives you the feeling you want the player to have, but don't expect the music and sound effects to do the work for you on making the scene enjoyable and immersive!

Once you have a rough draft of your soundtrack & SFX library, go back to Step 1 and make SURE you didn’t miss any audio that may be in other categories you didn’t listen to that might fit the scenes you’re working on.

Part 3: Obtain the Appropriate License to Use the Music & SFX and Ensure You Have Given Proper Attribution

Whenever you’re working with royalty free music & SFX you always have to keep in mind that just because the music is free doesn’t mean you don’t have to cite the author.

For example, if you’re using my personal Royalty Free Music Catalog at https://jordanwinslow.me/royaltyfreemusic then this part is very simple:

If you will not make money from your project directly or indirectly (this includes advertisements and YouTube monetization) then all you have to do is put “Music Downloaded From jordanwinslow.me/RoyaltyFreeMusic%E2%80%9D in your credits, description or somewhere easily visible in your project.

If you will make money from your project directly or indirectly, simply fill out the Commercial License Request Form found on the website and enter in the title of your project and your project’s information for EACH project you will require music for.

All of the sites I linked above have very similar licensing agreements, so just read up on the individual website before you download, and ensure you create a .txt document with all the links you need so you don’t forget!

The best part about all of the above libraries is that almost every song and SFX clip you download can be legally edited, looped, layered, remixed and changed any way you see fit!

The only restriction is you cannot sell or distribute your edited or remixed audio clips as standalone clips if they were your own because technically the author still retains copyright ownership over the files. But that does not mean you can't sell your film or video game with the edited audio!

If you are confused, double-check the licensing page on each website to be sure.

And that’s how you spend time instead of money to create a custom soundtrack for your film, video game or YouTube video!

What to Do if you Still Haven’t Found What You’re Looking For, or the Audio You Downloaded isn’t the Correct Format

If the audio you downloaded isn’t in the correct format for your software, you can use the free open source tool Audacity to convert it by using the "Export" menu to change the format of your audio or use this free online audio converter: https://audio-converter.online/

Keep in mind that certain audio formats like .mp3 have restrictions on where they can be used. I recommend .ogg since it is an open source audio format with great quality and compression.

Now if for some reason you don’t find the music or SFX you need in those libraries of thousands of songs and SFX, it’s probably time to consider looking for a volunteer composer or simply hiring a professional.

You can find low-cost audio engineers and composers on websites like Fiverr and Upwork, but keep in mind that quality products do not often come with low price tags, be wary of anything that seems "too good to be true" because it probably is.

And be sure to listen to their portfolio thoroughly before making a decision!

I know it’s not easy to make a career out of your passions when you’re on a limited budget, believe me, just read My Story on https://jordanwinslow.me/mystory if you want to know how I spent 6 years in poverty before becoming a successful electronic music producer & composer.

But I guarantee if you put the time into finding music and SFX in the above libraries, or looking for a great volunteer, you can get your project done at no cost other than the hardware and software you purchased!

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me any time!

See you later, creators!

Electronic Music Producer, Composer & Audio Engineer

jordanwinslow.me