Free Music for Your Videos | Hacker News Reader

Free Music for Your Videos

audiak.com

113 pointsqguiller47 comments

No contact info, no terms of service or privacy policy, not even an About page to describe who/what this is. All downloads are hiding behind bit.ly or dropbox links, so there's no clear attribution of where they're coming from.

This _feels_ about as scammy as it can get. It's possible that everything is above-board, but I would not feel safe using this content for anything public-facing.

It does not feel scammy to me. I appreciate a website without the stuff nobody reads :)

I can see a link to the SoundCloud page of each artist next to the download link. When I click through, all the artists seem to give some sort of permission to use their work freely.

The site claims that the music is available under CC-BY. In at least one case, this is not true. Caveat emptor.

All music on the site are licensed under CC-BY 3.0, please go to the profil artist to Check this!

Both tracks by Atch (https://soundcloud.com/atch-music/overyou and https://soundcloud.com/atch-music/freedom) state:

> "My music is free to use on social media AS LONG AS credit/attribution is given. To credit me correctly and avoid a copyright claim, you must copy and paste the below text into the description of your videos [...] If you wish to use my music for commercial purposes (online advertisements, podcasts etc), you will need to purchase a license. Please contact me at ..."

Edit: The SoundCloud metadata for all listed tracks does claim CC-BY 3.0. But in the case above it's clear that the artist does not actually intend for their tracks to be subject to the terms of that license. So what takes precedence: the copyright holder's statement, or the machine-readable metadata?

If I publish two otherwise identical repos, one with MIT license and one with copyright, there's no doubt as to what you are allowed to do with it. Why is this different?

It's more akin to one repo, where your package.json says "MIT" but your LICENSE.MD says "commercial use prohibited."

And yes, it’s CC-BY 3.0

> If you wish to use my music for commercial purposes (online advertisements, podcasts etc), you will need to purchase a license

This clearly makes it not CC-BY. Maybe CC BY NC?

IANAL but I think legally, if you put CC-BY on it, then just write in the comments that you can't use it commercially, that wouldn't stand. CC-BY-NC is available, and the author did not have to upload it as CC-BY in the first place.

To be clear, I still think this site has some problems, and author's wishes should be respected, but I think if the author wants you to not use it commercially, they should put the correct license on their work.

It's neither. You can't just match up the terms of Creative Commons licenses then assume because they are similar that you can say it's Creative Commons licensed.

Go Check the soundcloud link of the title and tell me what licence CC you see!

It is unclear what the actual license for the track is when the author says very clearly states that commercial use is restricted, but the author also selected CC BY 3.0.

These two things are in conflict with each other, so it probably makes sense to chose the most restrictive option.

The most important is to see the license CC under the title. The artist find a way to earn money.

I've been watching a lot of Travel vlogs recently, I am moving out to a new place next month. It's crazy how all those tunes sounds exactly the same. Great project though. I just wish those "CC BY artits" would be more creative.

I wish someone would explain how this actually happens.

I've had many takes at this exact topic and always ended up feeling most provided reasons are just speculation.

One of the better takes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIxY_Y9TGWI

Still, no info from actual producer as to why he made the music as it is.

there are some cc by artists on freemusicarchive who are quite original. the ones that immediately come to mind are Kevin MacLeod, Andy G. Cohen, Jahzzar, Scott Buckley

Thanks for the link. If you don’t mind, can you explain how this is different from what NCS (No Copyright Sounds) [0] is offering?

[0] https://ncs.io/

The Music on NCS are not under creative commons license.

NCS has some (very minimal) terms of use that you have to comply with: credit the artist. Creative Commons licensed work has no such requirement.

With the exception of CC0 (which usually isn't actually considered a Creative Commons license, and not the license used on this site), all Creative Commons license require attribution.

Ah yeah you're right.

Another good site for royalty-free music is Incomptech, it more than did its duty in my high school TV Production class...

https://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/

yes, Kevin MacLeod who runs that, also has well composed and just good music. also, it isn't a half-shady looking site like the one linked by OP

In the upload form I see the following

> This way, a track originally released as "free" becomes into a "copyrighted" song by a third company, affecting severely our reputation and making impossible to promote any other of your tracks.

How can someone use free music without risking either: a) the music was never free to use, and someone else uploaded the copyrighted music owned by someone else. b) the music is later copyrighted, and you are then infringing the copyright.

Do I understand copyright law wrong? Assuming you make a commercial product with it, you get screwed over this.

IANAL but I don't think that works can become copyrighted. It can be distributed with a license for free use, but then that license can't be revoked after the fact.

The license could be non-transferable and the work can be distributed with a more restrictive license in the future by the copyright holders, or not distributed at all. None of these should affect those that use the work legitimately with the permissive license given to them in the past.

edit: Maybe if a license is revocable or not must be spelled out in the license itself. Many open licenses seem to be explicitly irrevocable.

edit2: More on this topic https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4012/are-lice...

I think the question was what if the music is stolen.

E.g. imagine clone of a GPL github repo but with MIT slapped on it.

The problem is that Content ID systems are tangential to the law. They are private systems developed to cover tech companies collective asses. It is easier for them to take down all content matched in their content ID system than to verify the validity and legal ownership of every track uploaded to their system. The latter is very hard actually. I guess a solution would be for original creators to be able to upload their content to the content ID system and mark that content with the correct license. Then free to use content could be uploaded and scammers could be punished. I don’t know if this is already a feature they support.

Soundcloud used to be an awesome source for this kind of thing, but their product development has made it harder and harder to find CC tracks by genre.

Recently found and used a track that was free to use, but they would demonetize the track on Youtube. Tricky.

I was thinking about putting up some long, but silent, video on YouTube (probably an hour or two in length) - but didn’t know where I’d get some backing audio.

Unfortunately these sound clips look quite short (2-4min). Can anyone suggest where I’d find longer tracks?

> Can anyone suggest where I’d find longer tracks?

Check OpenGameArt Music[0] collection.

And if you need a background for too long videos just use those tracks which are "loops"[1]

[0] https://opengameart.org/art-search-advanced?keys=&field_art_...

[1] https://opengameart.org/art-search-advanced?keys=&title=&fie...

An easy way to get long ambient tracks is use Paul Stretch on literally any audio. Try taking some royalty free track and paulstretch it to 2 hours in Audacity.

My always go-to site is Jamendo. An active community and really great music.

Freemusicarchive is the place where a lot of people typically get music. You can search by license, genre, length, etc.

Better Music on Audiak :-)

how do you figure? audiak appears to have only a handful of songs, mainly of the same genre and not necessarily well composed, and no way to search or otherwise make use of it in a serious way without just listening to them all

archive.org the net label scene.

Can these be used in a commercial feature film? If so, what is required attribution wise?

Of course you can! Attribution is recommanded to support the artist.

Attribution is required not just to support the artist, but also to comply with the CC-BY licence terms.

maybe just my old android tablet, but i only see a list of tracks/ thumbnails vertically, with no search by genre, author, tag, length etc. Is it just me ? Nice idea though. thanks

any reason to not seed this with the massive semi-curated collection of cc-by music on freemusicarchive?

One licence and better music with audiak.com

Thanks. It lools interesting.

Thanks man! New song are coming!

Why does it say “never miss the next music”? Does the music get deleted often?

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