UniqueTracks has added four brand new sound effects sets from Blastwave FX to our growing collection of royalty free Sound Effects products.

Podcaster
Podcaster has everything you need to produce a professional podcast. Add music or just a beat loop to your intro and immediately give a focus to the theme of your show. With over 500 sound effects (Animals, Cartoon Effects, Crashes, Human Effects, Vehicles, Weapons and more), this set will let you underscore the humerous, contentious and exciting moments of your podcast.

WebTones
If you design and create professional Flash productions or web sites, then you will want to add this large assortment of multimedia sounds to your production toolbox. The WebTones collection features 1000 unique buttons, clicks, rollovers, pings, beeps, hits and production elements that can easily be plugged into your next production. This collection will provide you with the tools you need to add sonic life to your virtual creations.

Spoilers - Movie Trailer Sound Beds
If you’ve ever wondered where to find those great sonic effects that Hollywood post production editors lay into movies, trailers and commercials, look no further. This incredible set by Blastwave FX will amp-up your production with the latest, most modern audio effects available on the royalty free market. This collection, on 4 DVDs, has 300 stereo movie trailers and compositions with matching 5.1 surround files, plus 200 high impact stereo imaging elements.

Drones
Using long, sustained, audio drone effects is one of the most effective ways of using sound to build drama and interest in a media production. The material contained in the 4 DVD set Drones by Blastwave FX is specially made to give your production a professional, Hollywood-caliber sheen. In total, this collection has over 10 hours of unique sound effects in stereo and 5.1 Surround Sound.

Blastwave FX develops next-generation HD sound effects libraries for professional audio production. Their design and engineering team constantly pushes the sound envelope with innovative product formats, rich metadata, multi-channel libraries and the highest resolution audio that technology allows.

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The latest issue of UniqueTracks’ newsletter features an article I wrote that defines Music Clearance - the act of getting the permissions necessary to use music in your production. It also recommends some companies that will handle your music clearance problems when attempting to license a famous or even an obscure recording.

All Clear?
Music Clearance and Music Licensing

Every few weeks or so I’ll get a phone call with an inquiry that goes something like this…

I’d like to use Elvis Presley’s recording of ‘Don’t Be Cruel’ in my film.  Can you help me do that?

Regretfully, beyond recommending some other companies to investigate, I am not much help in this regard. Though licensing music is our core business, UniqueTracks only licenses recordings that we have created in-house or that we control the publishing rights to. 

What these folks are looking for is a firm that will do “music clearance” work for them.  Yes, there are companies you can turn to when you are looking to obtain music licensing rights but have no idea where to turn.  These companies will help you acquire the rights to use famous songs but they are even better at finding the rights for obscure songs. Music clearance companies are experts at finding the needle-in-the-haystack information that will eventually track down the song you’re interested in.  They will then act as your advocate with the publisher and record company to try and get you the best pricing available.

Read the complete article.

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UniqueTracks has just released 7 new royalty free classical music CD collections featuring the piano music of Chopin and ballet music Tchaikovsky.

Our new 4 volume Ballet Pack begins with over 1 hour of music from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake Ballet. Volume 2 continues with Tchaikovsky’s famous Sleeping Beauty Ballet. The third volume in the series features Les Sylphides, which is ballet music created from famous piano pieces by Frederic Chopin. The Ballet Pack is completed with volume 4, The Romantic Ballet, a compilation of great ballet recordings including tracks from Giselle, Sylvia, Coppelia and Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker. This is the most concentrated and complete assortment of ballet music now available in the royalty free classical market.

We’ve created a four volume Chopin Pack that concentrates on Chopin’s solo piano music. Volume 1 features many famous piano pieces including the lyrical Berceuse and the much-performed Raindrop Prelude. Volume 2 is a collection of Waltzes and Etudes while volume 3, Great Classics - Chopin, concentrates on the Mazurkas and Polonaises. The last volume in the set, Chopin Piano Concertos, features performances of both of Chopin’s virtuosic piano concertos.

The 3 volume Tchaikovsky Pack presents 3 hours of masterful symphonic music by Pytor Ilych Tchaikovsky. The collection begins with one of Tchaikovsky’s most performed symphonies; his Symphony No. 5 in E minor (Op. 64). The second volume continues with his famous Symphony No. 6 (Pathetique) in B minor Op. 74. The third volume in the series, Great Classics - Tchaikovsky, presents a complete performance of Tchaikovsky’s The Seasons as well as excerpts from his Nutcracker Ballet Suite.

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UniqueTracks has released 5 new volumes of royalty free classical music entitled The Opera Pack. These recordings feature some of the most famous and recognizable songs in the world.

Remember the famous helicopter attack scene in Apocalypse Now? That scene was made even more dramatic (some might say infamous) with its use of Richard Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries as soundtrack. Ride of the Valkyries is featured in our Opera Pack collection.

You may have followed the story of Paul Potts, a mobile phone salesman from South Wales who, in June of 2007, stunned Simon Cowell and the other judges when he sang Puccini’s Nessun Dorma on the TV show Britain’s Got Talent. He went on to become the winner of the show. A recording of the aria Nessun Dorma is also included in the Opera Pack.

Here is a short description of each CD in the collection. Altogether there are 74 tracks in the 5 volume set.

Volume 1 Famous Opera: Arias
18 famous arias- Songs include Nessun Dorma from Turandot, The Flower Duet from Lakme, Humming Chorus from Madame Butterfly, O Mio Babbino Caro

Volume 2 Famous Opera: Mozart
Great Arias and Overtures from Mozart’s most famous operas including Cosi Fan Tutte, Don Giovanni, The Magic Flute and The Marriage of Figaro.

Volume 3 Famous Opera: Verdi
Great opera from Verdi including selections from Rigoletto, La Traviata, Aida and Il Trovatore.

Volume 4 Famous Opera: Wagner
Famous instrumental orchestral works from the operas of Richard Wagner including Ride of the Valkyries

Volume 5 Famous Opera: Overture & Chorus
Symphonic Overtures and Choral music from various famous operas including Carmen, Barber of Seville, Der Freishutz, I Pagliacci, Faust, Thieving Magpie and La Gioconda.

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Some licensing questions that have come up lately….

Q: The ownership rights to a product I have developed using UniqueTracks music are being bought-out by another company. How is the music licensing affected? Is the UniqueTracks music license transferred with all ownership rights for the product?

A: No, not immediately. In order for the company that is buying out your product to have full rights to the UniqueTracks soundtrack used within, they too will have to purchase a license for the specific tracks.

Q: I am a freelance designer and I’m creating a Flash production for a client. How does your license agreement work when the music I choose becomes part of the client’s production?

A: The company that ends up owning the project should be the licensee for any tracks you choose from the UniqueTracks Production Music Library.

Tip: If are a freelance designer, you can use the “Bill to” address for the company address (the owner of the project) and use the “Ship to” address for your address when purchasing music online from our website.

Did you know we can provide free low-resolution preview tracks for your presentation to the client if you require it. Upon approval by the client, you can then purchase the licensing and the full-resolution tracks.

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It’s a compliment, I know. Over the past year I’ve received several inquiries from budding songwriters seeking to use our royalty free background music as accompaniment for their words. I got a phone call just now from a songwriter asking if she could use our Extreme Metal Mayhem disk and sing her own words and melodies over the tracks. It is always hard to tell these folks that this is not the intention of our production music, that we cannot license it to be used in this way.

The reason we don’t license music this way has to do with copyright. All of UniqueTracks’ music compositions are copyrighted and owned by one of our publishing companies. The recording itself is copyrighted and owned by UniqueTracks. In other words, the music has already been published. If you were to add vocals to the exisiting music, you would be creating a different musical work which would need its own copyright and that would involve sharing publishing rights and other legalities.

I’m always surprised when I receive these calls because it just never occurred to me that this could be a possible use of our music. When I was young and starting to write music, it never occurred to me to take an existing recording and write my own words to it and then call that a song I’d written. But in today’s world of digital sampling, peer-to-peer file sharing music sites and loops software like Acid and Garageband, where you take small pre-recorded snippets of music and combine them into a track, it’s easy to see how some young people, eager to get started with their musical careers, become confused about what songwriting entails.

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I’ve written an article for our September newsletter describing the reasons why I dislike the term “royalty free music” even though this is the main search phrase that brings new visitors to our site. My reasons mostly have to do with the general confusion about what this term means and the fact that in some cases, TV broadcast being one of them, “royalty free” usage is not at all accurate.

The UniqueTracks license agreement gives very wide usage rights. This article attempts to provide a more accurate description of what production music libraries like UniqueTracks actually provide, namely, quick and easy, one-stop music licensing.

Read complete article
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As you may know, there is right now a lot of legal wrangling going on over what music is legal to use [in podcasts] and what is not. ASCAP and BMI, the major performance rights organizations in the US, want to license and in a sense, control the use of music in podcasting. They want to treat the new format like radio, where the podcaster must buy a license to use commercially available music in their podast.

If you have any experience with this, or can point to some links, please post a comment, I’d like to build up some more information regarding the use of music in podcasting.

Did you know that UniqueTracks production music can be used royalty free in your podcast? Using royalty free music relieves you of having to obtain permission or licenses from BMI or ASCAP . You become legally licensed to use the music in your podcast (in as many issues as you’d like).

One good method is to pick a tune that can become the “theme” music for your show. You can use our tracks as your theme music or as transition music between topics. With our licensing, a small one-time fee provides you with a legal-to-use track that you can use in as many of your shows as you wish.

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