LibGuides: STDA 120: 4D Design: Sound Resources: More Sound Resources

Royalty-Free

Royalty-free means that you do not have to pay the creator to use this work per use. HOWEVER, you often have to pay to get the work first (whether you pay it or you use materials that we have purchased that are royalty-free).

Royalty-free works are often without many restrictions on their use. You will still need to check to see if you need to give credit to the creator of the work.

Online Sound Resources

Jamendo This link opens in a new window
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Jamendo has thousands of Creative Commons music tracks.
Make sure to use the Advanced Search to limit your searching to Creative Commons licensed works.
Creative Commons This link opens in a new window
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Search for Creative Commons Licensed images, music, media and videos on a variety of sites.
Please note that search.creativecommons.org is not a search engine, but rather offers convenient access to search services provided by other independent organizations. CC has no control over the results that are returned. Do not assume that the results displayed in this search portal are under a CC license. You should always verify that the work is actually under a CC license by following the link.
Musopen This link opens in a new window
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Recorded public domain music. All materials are in the public domain.

Community Audio (Internet Archive)
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Thousands of audio tracks available under assorted Creative Commons Licenses.
LibriVox
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Search thousands of public domain audiobooks, including fiction, non-fiction and poetry. Primarily in English, but includes more than twenty languages, including German, French, Spanish, Dutch and Italian.
Netlabels (Internet Archive)
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This collection hosts complete, freely downloadable/streamable, often Creative Commons-licensed catalogs of 'virtual record labels'.
Project Gutenberg Audio Books
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Human-read and computer-generated audio books, primarily in English, but other languages are available (including Chinese, Dutch, Italian, French, German, Spanish and more). All materials are in the public domain.
BBC Sound Effects
These 16,016 BBC Sound Effects are made available by the BBC in WAV format to download for use under the terms of the RemArc Licence. The Sound Effects are BBC copyright, but they may be used for personal, educational or research purposes, as detailed in the license.

Creative Commons Licenses

Understanding Creative Commons Licenses
This site will show you the difference between all of the different Creative Commons licenses so that you can determine which ones you can use for your project (allows remixing, must be used exactly, needs you to credit the creator, etc.).

Creative Commons licenses allow creators to make a license that gives you the right to do different things with their creations. Creative Commons allows you to do more with other people's work than copyright.

There are six different license types, but not all will be helpful for your work. The four major elements are:

Attribution (BY) - you must credit the creator of the work you are using
ShareAlike (SA) - you must license your work under the same Creative Commons license if you use material from a SA license
NoDerivs (ND) - you cannot change the material and it must presented whole in your work
NonCommercial (NC) - you cannot use this material for commercial projects

The four elements combine to make the six license types. The licenses that will be helpful for your projects are below (from most helpful to least helpful):

Attribution - CC BY
Attribution NonCommercial - CC BY NC
Attribution ShareAlike - CC BY SA
Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike - CC BY NC SA

These two licenses aren't helpful for your projects since they don't allow you to make derivatives (i.e., remix their material into your project):

Attribution NoDerivs - CC BY ND
Attribution NonCommercial NoDervis - CC BY NC ND

To see more about the individual licenses, click the link below:

Creative Commons Logos
All of the different versions of Creative Commons logos that you could use for your projects in a variety of formats (png, eps, etc.)

Public Domain

Creative works that are in the public domain do not have copyright protection and may be used freely.

They fall under these broad categories:

Works of the U.S. Government
Facts and Non-Creative Works
Copyrighted Material That Has Expired

See the links below for helpful tools to help you determine if something is in the public domain.

Copyright Term and the Public Domain in the United States
This chart helps you to determine if a work is in the public domain. It covers published work, unpublished work, works published outside the US by foreign nationals or US citizens living abroad, sound recordings, and architectural works.
Public Domain Sherpa
Reader-friendly site all about the public domain and copyright.