How to add a little concentrated WOW to your work,
with a minimum of cost and hassle
A
little while back, I let you in on my most trusted sources for procuring clip art and other stock imagery. Some of you were kind enough to leave a few comments with tips of your own. Today we shift to the audio side of the equation. It’s possible that you want to kick up the professionalism of your video by a notch or two. Or maybe you just want to break up the crushing monotony of your own voice droning on for minutes on end. Screencast background music can be just the ticket.
You’ve got an ocean of possibilities here. Perhaps you want music throughout, or perhaps just a stinger and a tag (music only during the intro & outro segments). Do you want a frenetic, high-energy piece, or something subtle and laid back? I get a lot of students (& clients) asking me about where I find my music.
Unlike my image collection process, where I use an eclectic range of sources, I’ve got ONE source for my audio. Uno. Eins. I have only one source for only one reason. I’ve never had cause to look elsewhere.
The quality is choice. The cost is reasonable. And there are some serious time-saving and mood-enhancing advantages you simply can’t get anywhere else. I’ll explain.
Background Music with SmartSound
For my money, there’s no better music source than SmartSound.com for screencast background music. They’ve got thousands of high-quality, royalty-free tracks on offer that you can buy and use however you like. These tracks can be picked up individually, or with other thematically-related tracks on albums. While appealing, this isn’t a significant departure thus far from any of the other major music sources out there. Where SmartSound really shines is in the way its musical library is structured. Most of its musical works are coded in a multi-layered, highly customizable format. This format is designed to work with its propriety Sonicfire Pro software. This offers the following advantages over standard musical libraries:
- Your musical selection can be set to any length. This alone is worth the cost of admission. Most libraries offer a particular selection in several lengths, usually something like 0:30, 1:00, and 3:00. This often means that you have to meticulously cut several versions together to get the piece to exact length you need, which is incredibly time-consuming. And unless you’re a pretty skillful editor, this Frankenmusic simply won’t sound right. But with SmartSound, you just drag the piece out the desired length, and the score is automatically rewritten to correspond to that length. No more weird cuts. No more fading music in and out to cover up the fact that your chosen piece was too long. I can’t tell you how much time this has saved me.
- Instruments can be individually turned on or off. You can customize sections of your score with different collections of instruments. Want to do a musical segue that only features percussion? With SmartSound, you can.
- Each track comes with multiple “moods.” Every musical piece features several moods, and you can specifically time these to synchronize with what’s happening your video. For example, if your screencast has a money shot, a special “ta-da!!!” moment that you really want to stress, you can crank up the mood to correspond to it. Now, the background music isn’t just “playing in the background.” It’s an active, accurate reflection of what the viewer is watching. It’s as if a Hollywood composer custom-wrote your score. You can even add “hits” at specific points (such as a cymbal crash) to drive a particular point home.
And for all this, the cost is pretty reasonable. Individual tracks start around $30-40, and full albums (usually around ten tracks or so) are usually $99. But they run special deals all the time, and they also offer some pretty radical volume deals that can make purchasing in bulk a real money-saver. The SonicFire Pro software costs $100, but it does include the Core Foundations starter album. Also, if you pick up a five-album music pack (any 5 albums you choose) for $250, they’ll throw in the software for free. If you want to go whole hog, you spend $450 and get 20 albums, with a whole year to pick out the exact ones you want.
Finally, as an alternative to using the SonicFire software, they sell special plugins that give you all the SmartSound functionality right within non-linear editors, like Premiere, After Effects, Final Cut, and Avid. Man, what a boon it would be to my workflow if I had access to this toolset from within Camtasia Studio’s timeline (you listening, TechSmith?).
For the record, I should state that I have no affiliate relationship with SmartSound, and do not stand to benefit financially or otherwise by plugging their toolset. I’m just a very satisfied customer.
What do you think, Screencasters? Have you tried out the SmartSound system yet? Sound off on your experiences in the comments section below. Likewise, if you use another system you really love, let us know about it…
October 4, 2012 @ 12:24 pm
Unfortunately, SmartSound can’t be confused with SmartBusiness. When they figure out that they’ll make much more money by giving away their software and selling their media for more reasonable prices, then I’ll take another look at them. Meanwhile, I can do just fine with media that costs me as little as $1.99 a track – and if you have the slightest idea what you’re doing, it doesn’t have to come out as “Frankenmusic” or take you hours to edit, either.
October 4, 2012 @ 3:09 pm
Hi Brian:
As with any resource I mention, your individual mileage may vary based on your own experience. I love SmartSound and find them reasonably priced compared to other similar services I’ve tried. I also find that the software’s feature set yields a MUCH more professional result than cobbling something together by hand.
I used to custom-cut my musical tracks as a matter of course, so the time and hassle for me certainly weren’t due to lack of practice. But perhaps you’re simply a more naturally skilled editor than I am. Or maybe you discovered some workflow tips to cut your time on task. If so, I encourage you to share them with the rest of us.
I’m also sure that our readers (particuarly the more cost-conscious among us) would love to know where you can find buy-out tracks of comparable quality for only $2 a pop. Do you have a link you can share?
thanks, d.
October 4, 2012 @ 3:38 pm
As a retiree and strictly an amateur producer of presentations, using Camtasia, Screencast and other products, I don’t have a lot of money to spend on supplementary media. After searching around quite a bit, I discovered JewelBeat, http://www.jewelbeat.com, which produces tens of thousands of fully orchestrated original tracks in almost every genre and, to my great and pleasurable surprise, sells them for the single-track price of only 99 cents. As with their pricey competitors, they do sell collections for a bulk price. An additional service they offer, also for reasonable cost, is that they will customize a track to any length that a customer requests. This is very useful to one like myself who is not perfect at looping and audio editing but wants to proper beginning and ending to a track. Somethng else I like about this vendor: Any track you are interested in can be auditioned in its entirety, not just in a clip of 30 seconds or less.
October 4, 2012 @ 5:01 pm
I love SmartSound. It’s fast, easy, professional, and done.
If you’re just starting out with it, you can use the free version of their software. It doesn’t have as many options, especially for changing mood in the middle of a video, but you can choose a piece of music, enter the length of your video, and it’s done. Their full software is certainly worth the upgrade, but you can try it out without the up-front expense.
Their license is another definite plus. Some of those cut-rate music sites expect you to pay for the music all over again every time you use it, others tack on an extra cost for an “extended” multi-use license, and still others have extraordinarily narrow rules about what you can do with their music. (There are exceptions, of course.) SmartSound, on the other hand, sells you the music once, and then you’re free to use it repeatedly, with very few restrictions. So, when I produce a series of tutorial videos for one of my clients, I can find a track on SmartSound, pay for it once, and use it as theme music throughout the entire series. I love that.
October 5, 2012 @ 4:51 am
That’s really cool and I’d love to check it out, but I’m an educator. The Soundzabound royalty-free music database has hundreds of tracks accessible for free via subscription via my educator online library in my state. I’ve also bought albums of royalty free music from Footage Firm for $8 each, which I will also play on loop on low in the classroom during POGIL activities.
July 7, 2014 @ 6:29 pm
Coming from the analog days and “razor-blading” a music track to fit, SmartSound is pretty amazing.
However, a cautionary note should be added around using music if it is under narration. It is easy to lose the narration in the music. Getting the right levels between the narration and the music is not trivial. It is not a simple matter of “ducking” the music; even at low levels music can interfere with the intelligibility of a narration. …and if you “duck” the music to a very low level, having music becomes stupid.
The old fix was to use a compressor on the narration along with judicious use of EQ to have the narration cut through in the mix. I still use that approach along with using a 416 to record the narration with more punch. There are probably more 2014 methods with plug-ins to compress and expand the narration.
It is also critical to use multiple monitoring methods to QA the mix. Your headphones are rarely a good indicator of the narration/music mix or at least it hasn’t worked well for me. I use near-field monitors and check against my Avantone cube monitors. Mine are very old, but here’s a link to the new ones:
http://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/MixCubesActB/
I also listen to the final mix in the car as a sanity check. If you listen to radio and TV commercials, you’ll hear examples of this issue frequently. So use care when you use music with a narration.