Suggest royalty-free music sites!

I'm trying to find music for my Alien Space Beetles game, because I've gotta do it eventually if I plan to finish the game, and I'm having a hell of a time finding the right sort of music for it.

I'm not sure if I should use orchestral, or some kind of electronic music... But I've been listening to all the stuff on sites like MusicBakery and Sound Rangers and the only song I've been able to find which MIGHT work is this one:

http://www.beatsuite.com/itemdetails/2746/

Which kind of reminds of of one of the songs in Star Control 2. (Can you guess which one?)

Most of the techno stuff I've listened to is just wrong, or annoying, or way too repetitive though. Like Trance stuff sort of works, but it repeats the same damn thing over and over.

So if you've been going around to sites like this and know of one that might have something I could use, (either techno, or string-heavy orchestral are the most likely candidates) lemme know!

http://www.jamendo.com

not royalty-free, but Creative Commons - some of this music you can use for commercial stuff. You can also use songs that was marked as "non commercial" - as free and optional available package.

sshift: perhaps I can bring a tailor-made solution for ya. Drop me an email if you're interested..

sswift: that track is HORRIBLE. I totally recommend CS_TBL btw, like 100% if you can work out a good deal.

(o/t) CS_TBL, expect some money from me soon re: Holiday Bonus. I've got all the reports in now. Lemme know your paypal address.

I'd prefer to license stuff that's already written. Partly because it's cheaper, but mainly because I know exactly what I'm getting. I don't have the money to spend $1000 on custom music tracks and then end up with something that doesn't portray the right feeling. Having the right music for a game can make or break it.

Plus I trongly suspect that the right sort of music for the game is orchestral, and few people who avdertise themselves as composers can manage that style properly. Techno is easy to do in comparison. I can do techno. :-)

Oh and you think the track is horrible? Well, I'll wait to hear what other people say, but people comaplined about the western music I wanted to use in my ice cream game as well, and I'm sure I made the right choice there. It's impossible to please everyone. Even in techno, some poeple like trance, some like house, some like Nine Inch Nails. Personally, I'm a NiN fan.

Also, everyone loved the music in Star Control 2, and this sounds a lot like one of the tunes in it.

Oh and a bunch of people here said they didn't want me to use orchestral in this game either.

So you'll understand if I don't neccessarily go with what you think is good music. :-) But I'm not even near deciding yet what to use, and I need like at least five tracks which go well together.

CS_TBL:
I would be more than happy to listen to any samples you might have on the web, but I really doubt that I'll want to contract this out to someone, unless you've got something on your website that already is close to what I need.

MrCredo:
Uh... No offense, but that site is slow as hell, it takes 15 seconds for a song to start playing, and the music is terrible.

That's exactly the sort of site I'm not looking for. It'd take a week just to go through all the music.

Oh and I said royalty-free, not free. The music doesn't have to be free.

If you don't mind the tracker scene then check out http://modarchive.org/ you will need a player like Modplug ( http://www.modplug.com/ ) to hear them or use the milkmod lib ( http://mikmod.raphnet.net/ ) in your program.

sswift:

These are game re-arranges, with own additions here and there.

Galaxy Hero Legend 2 intro
Metal Gear 2007
Solid Snake 2007
An older version of the same Solid Snake tune is here, I didn't make that particular youtube video, someone just added my track to it.. :P Another video of the original game intro was also pimped a bit by someone I don't know. (original mp3 here)

And of course: Grey's Holiday Bonus

Daw:
The problem with trying to pick tunes off a site like Modarchive is that there's a billion of them of varying quality, and if the song wasn't written very recently then your chances of being able to contact the artist to discuss licensing aren't that great.

And the site caused firefox to lock up on me.

sswift: CS_TBL does great orchestral. In fact I was talking to a composer at Casuality who did the music for Fairies, Mystery Inn, Atlantis Sky Patrol and he said the music in Holiday Bonus was great, very warm and with character unlike lots of other games (no names being mentioned). Anyway, that's enough pimping. Good luck finding the right music.

>>>Uh... No offense, but that site is slow as hell, it takes 15 seconds for a song to start playing, and the music is terrible. That's exactly the sort of site I'm not looking for. It'd take a week just to go through all the music.

Hm - this site loads fast here... i found some nice music at this site...


>>Oh and I said royalty-free, not free. The music doesn't have to be free.

What is your problem with creative commons?

I don't have a problem with music under that kind of license. I was just making sure you understood that I was willing to pay for the music if need be.

http://www.softworxs.de
http://derekaudette.ottawaarts.com/music.php

I've used softworx before. Also Kevin Macleod http://www.incompetech.com and also http://www.dilvie.com

CS_TBL, Off topic: How do you get decent orchestral music, Far as i'm aware (and i've paid a *lot* for the pleasure) there are no decent soft-synths of any kind to deal with it.

(and Synful is kinda buggy on my DAW of choice.)

*love* your music :-) Gives me something to aim at lol.

Also I recommend Cygnus if you want some nice synth music or trance.

Cyg: decent libs, but foremost: decent/traditional orchestrating/arranging. Someone with the ultimate samples could still f*ck-up the whole thing when he/she doesn't have a background in traditional orchestrating/arranging. I've heard decent libs in the wrong hands times and times again all around on indie/game fora and smaller projects. Sound wise it may all be nice, but you can just hear that the composer is actually a standard pop/dance/synth-guy without relevant background.

Cygnus:

In the past half hour I've made some excerpts from old works to emphasize my point. This is all pre-2003, well maybe pre-2004'ish, but at least years old. The libs back then were typical libs dating back from the 90's. Oh, and everything was made in Impulse Tracker. ^_^ Layered tho, I'd end up with a violins .it, a violas .it, a cellos .it etc. all crammed with the relevant samples.

A summary of this track:

00:00 - 00:11 - these strings are even cheap ones from those record-shop entry-level sample CDs you'd get for 30 quid or something.

00:12 - 00:31 - typical 90's Akai strings, heavily layered with solo strings tho (which would be typical for my stuff elsewhere in this track, including the first one @ 00:00). The heavy synthbass @ 00:23 comes from my Supernova 2 rack (own patch)

00:31 - 01:01 - excerpt from a TV-movie's finale/plot.

01:01 - 01:36 - excerpt from a short movie (some kinda Fairytale'ish Snowhite'ish resurrection from death)

01:36 - 02:31 - Last part of ^ end credits.



So, again, Impulse Tracker could at once load 64MB worth o' samples, and then 99 samples max (and yes, 1 harp would've been like 26 samples already)! Everything above was made in IT, this somewhat points out that stuff had to be small in the first place.

Personally I think these old tracks haven't dated much. I blame it on the arranging/composition. :-)

I give it to ya: developments in synths/samples are for 80% based on users being lazy or uncreative, and not because some company made an invention or something.

*clicky*

That is some good work! I would love to be able to do that stuff.

I've always been known as a modern day Jean-Michelle Jarre myself though :-) [edit] *Younger* JMJ.