Generated Music

[Russell Heaton]

Hi all,

In the past I have used Cinescore to generate music for my travel documentaries. (I know, your eyes are rolling back in your head as you read this....) As many will know, Sony aren't developing this product any further. I have twenty theme packs but, to be honest, most of them aren't much chop and I find myself using the same stuff over and again.

So, are there any GOOD alternatives out there? They don't necessarily need to work as plug-ins in Vegas, but it would help.

Cheers

Russ

[Craig Longman]

Take a look at Express Track from Smart Sound:

Sonicfire Express Track, Royalty Free Music Editor, Movie Soundtrack Software - SmartSound

It's free and come with 5 albums. You can buy more, their current special if 5 albums for 200, but have a good loyalty purchase program normally also. They have a pretty good collection of albums, and a few more are added every month or so.

The cool thing with Express Track, is the music is multi-track, so you can adjust the sound and feel of it immensely, and you can tell Express Track to give you a piece of a certain length. So you can not only use a similar 'sound' throughout a clip, changing the instruments depending on the application, but you can get it custom fit to length. Then, hit a button, render to a WAV and bring it in.

Their pay product, Sonicfire Pro, lets you bring video in, setup important markers and it will create music in time with the markers, ducking, all sorts of things.

I haven't purchased it Sonicfire Pro, as so far it's been alright for me to just figure out the lengths and make it in Express Track. But for a big long piece, I can see doing all the music work in one place/chunk might be helpful.

Hope this helps,

[Russell Heaton]

Thanks Craig,

I'll look into it.

Cheers

Russ

[Harry Simpson]

I too used Cinescore for short videos and it seemed a little cheesy but it was free. This Sonic Express seems to be very similar to Cinescore so I might look into it.

Got a special till the end of the month ad from Sony for Acid Pro 7 and Sound Forge Pro 10. Where do these products fit into the music generation landscape? I'm using Sony Vegas Pro 11.

Music generation deal seems to have gotten slightly wacky.

TIA
Harry

[Seth Bloombaum]

Sound Forge is a wav editor. Some folks swear by it for dealing with mono and stereo tracks. It's a slightly different workflow than you're used to in Vegas - there is no "project" model, there's only the sound, the edits you make, the efx you apply, and the sound you save. We used to call this a "destructive" editor, because once you save over your original file, it's gone.

There's one unique tool "Clipped Peak Restoration", that can help with overmodulated recordings. Otherwise, efx are much the same as Vegas, though I think the current SF comes with CD-Architect (which is great for audio CD authoring), and maybe Sony's Noise Reduction 2.0 (which is pretty good too.)

I'm not sure but that Vegas Pro may come with NR 2.0 now too... Sony tends to change the bundles from time to time.

Acid is a type of composition program commonly called a looping program. It isn't music generation like Cinescore, instead you buy loops and *you* make the decisions about where in the Acid timeline you use which piece of which loop. Quite a bit more difficult to use than Cinescore, it helps to have some musicianship, but the results can be much more specific to your needs. Even with some musicianship, I'd say there's a significant learning curve - this isn't a read-the-manual-good-to-go product.

[Marcus Martell]

Interesting..
But i Have a question: u r free to use that background music on your docs of you Have to pay any kind of royalty?

[Dennis Vogel]

Another route you could go is to buy royalty-free music. There's even some sites with free, royalty-free music. A quick search should turn up a dozen or more that might get you what you want.

D

[Craig Longman]

Originally Posted by Marcus Martell

Interesting..
But i Have a question: u r free to use that background music on your docs of you Have to pay any kind of royalty?

Impossible question to answer, as it all depends on the license provided by the place you obtained the music from. The SmartSound stuff is royalty free, up to 10 000 unit distributions, at which point you need to buy a mechanical license for it. I would imagine any loops you buy for ACID would be the same, or even looser as you're putting together the music yourself. There are tons of free music and loops you can use, many of which just require an attribution. I think you can use ACID Express for free, check out ACIDplanet.com brought to you by Sony Creative Software for more on that.

A couple of the shorts in the last competition I was in used music from Royalty Free Music, Copyright Free Music, Background Music, On-Hold Music and I really liked what I heard, but I've not used anything of theirs.

I find that finding music is a non stop process, it turns up all over the place. I really need to organise all my music links at some point... =)

Hope this helps,

CraigL

[Harry Simpson]

Thanks for clarifying this. Looks like a link list of Royalty Free music sites is the way to go