ROYALTY-FREE AUDIO

In case you don't already know, here's a myth-buster to blow your mind: Royalty-free music is not free!

You purchase royalty-free music before you download it.

The site I visited charged $59 per song. Some offerings cost as little as $29. Some of the tracks were pretty bad — sort of like clip art for the ears — but others were OK, once you navigated past categories like "Smooth Ass Grooves" and "Static Discharge." The problem is that you don't always hear enough of the track in the preview to decide if it's really going to work, so you might end up buying multiple audio for a single production.

The Taylor Acoustic is not quite as good as a Martin, but it's as close as I will ever get and good enough for me.

FREE?

So here's the "free" part of the equation: You don't pay an added fee each time the audio is played on your site; so it's royalty-free but not totally free. And it may take a long time to find something that works with your production, so add hours of lost wages into the price of royalty-free. Brian Storm of MediaStorm said during his Kalish Picture Editing Workshop presentation that it took 3 days to find music for just one video and two years to license the Coldplay song featured on his Web site. I wonder if he still uses that song now that royalty rates have risen.

YOU’RE STUCK

What's more, there's not much you can do with the royalty-free file you download, except fade it in or out as your video requires. This is another reason you would need multiple files for just one project.

If you look at this MediaStorm offering — it's about animal abuse — you will hear some very nice music, well placed and utilized, but I bet there are 8 or 10 royalty-free pieces used in the span of only 10 minues. I am guessing it's royalty-free because I see no music credit.

TWEAKER MANIA

The beauty with self-created music is that I can go back into the original file and tweak my audio drastically, if necessary, compressing here, stretching there, or building in pauses to suit the video needs of the producer. Since I have to start someplace, I create audio before I see video, but I can always go back and make adjustments.

MAKE YOUR OWN!

My theory is that you might as well spend the time on something original, something no one else can grab later for their production. Think of this scenario: What if you find some royalty-free music you love — after three days of searching — and then you hear it while on hold with your dentist or insurance company? Not too cool! The solution? Make your own!