Production Music

[Mark Suszko]

My first choice is to use Sonicfire pro 5, because it does exactly what you ask for: creates a unique version of the tune, to exact time specs, specifically arranged and mixed to play well underneath a human voice narration. But libraries I like include The Music bakery, Sounddogs, Pond 5, Digital Juice, and AudioJungle.

[Joseph W. bourke]

I’m with Mark, although I use Sony ACID to create my music beds. There’s a bit of a learning curve, but there’s a giant collection of loop libraries in all styles, and the ability to change the beats per minute to match the pace of your cutting. They also sell what they call 8 packs, which are 8 track versions, similar to the way Sonicfire creates their music, so you can add or mute tracks, creating custom versions of music beds.

I also like Pond5 a lot – good prices, quality music, and lots of choices.

Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com

[Mark Suszko]

Acid’s library is truly gargantuan. Though the impression I got about the titles the last time I reviewed them, that they trended towards producing pop and hip-hop music tracks more than anything. I could be mistaken, though.

[Tom Sefton]

Lemoncake is great

[Matt Townley]

Killer Tracks is good, too.

[Nick Griffin]

I used to use Killer Tracks almost exclusively and still have 7 or so libraries of theirs here on CD. The problem became when clients wanted to put their 8 minute video on their website or YouTube and I had to tell them it would cost $900 or more. Many of our clients have 1,000 or fewer prospects for their products in the entire world, so they balk at paying to license a music blanket as if millions and millions of people will listen to it.

That’s when PremiumBeat.com, MyMusicSource.com, Audiojungle.net, Audiosparx.com and others started to become VERY attractive, especially royaltyfreemusiclibrary.com where entire CD collections can cost less than a single “laser drop” from Killer. (Oh, and yes, Mark’s suggestion of SonicFire is a good one, too.)

Yes, of course the music from the big boys like Killer is overall superior, but if you spend anytime browsing you can get stuff almost as good, at a tenth of the price and without the paperwork.

We’ll still keep Killer around and may need something of theirs from time to time, but they’re no longer my first choice. They don’t seem to realize that, like a lot of stock photography and stock video, the world has changed.

[Stephen Smith]

Audiojungle.net is my most favorite site for music.

Stephen Smith

Utah Video Productions

Check out my Vimeo page

[Jon-michael Brown]

Thanks everyone very helpful advice! And thanks for sharing Nick. I too was looking into Killer Tracks because they were recommended to me. Similarly, I also am working with smaller clients that all want their videos on their websites but are not interested at all to pay the Killer Tracks prices – even if they are slightly better.

[Jeff Breuer]

iStock is terrible to search on, but they have a track every once in a great while I will use. If you do a lot of super cheap work you can get a Videoblocks subscription and get some stuff there. I’ve also bought a couple libraries at Stock20.

[Chris Tompkins]

Check out beatsuite.com too.

Chris