I am planning on adding music to my Photo PDFs, but I don't want to infringe on any copyrights of either the artists or the producers of the music. How does one obtain the rights to reproduce music? Also, are there any "public domain" music sites that will allow reproduction of the music. I'd like to use Classical, light Classical, and/or Blues and light rhythm.
— Doug
I have to confess, that we sort of cheat — not by breaking any laws or violating any copyrights, but rather by coming at this from a different angle.
There is a sizable corner of the music world known as "loops." These are short segments of musical phrases that can be strung together to write your own music. By combining any number of loops and repeating patterns into a multi-track audio software, you can easily create music riffs for your projects that are royalty free and unique to you — because you are the creator! Another way to express your creative impulses in a project. There are thousands — check that, more like millions — of loops available via download representing every musical instrument, style, key, beat, and rhythm you could possibly want. Most are free; some of the better ones have a nominal cost. Do a Google search for loops or free loops.
Here are a couple of longer experiments where I was just playing with the segments to see what I could do. The first one is from 2001 titled Dharma Greb's. It uses 27 different loops.
They are certainly not great tunes, but I did have fun with the concept and learned enough to make audio for our products.
Here are a few of the individual loops used in the first composition.
PW-Flute1a-Short-FadeIn-96bpm-C
And finally, here are a couple of very simple loop compositions that I made in about 10 minutes of playing around that may sound familiar to LensWork fans.I first discovered this world with a program called Acid Loops, now Acid Pro 7 from Sony. I now use Adobe Audition to create them. Here's an online software that I've seen mentioned a few times, but I have no experience with it.
Before I discovered loops, I tried — unsuccessfully — to find and buy canned, royalty free music created by professional musicians. They all sounded like business success meeting themes that the corporate world would probably love. I spent countless hours previewing sample cuts on the web and even purchased a couple of CDs of royalty free music. They were all pretty awful — at least for my uses. Who knows, however, they might be a lot better now than when I was looking for something 10 years ago.
I can tell you this: it's a lot more fun to create your own music with loops and a rainy afternoon!