Free CC music

by rezonant on 04/13/2009 17:25, 26 messages, last message: 04/16/2009 09:31, 4819 views, last view: 05/03/2024 15:26

Hello Sauerbraten!

I'm one of the musicians of Medusa Panacea, and we've recently posted a big chunk of CC-licensed music. We're very interested in finding open source projects which need good music and Sauerbraten seems like a good fit for some of our more rock-ish songs. The full license is CC-By-NC-SA. Songs are streamable and downloadable from:

http://soundclick.com/medusapanacea

The songs are in 128kbps MP3. We'd be glad to send you higher quality versions (in whatever format) if you'd like to make use of it. We're always posting more music so please add us to your bookmarks!

And thanks for making such an awesome open source game! I look forward to checking out Eisenstern when it pops up!

   Board Index   

#7: ..

by Maxime -Max of S2D- Lebled on 04/13/2009 23:08

Odious' style is much better and fitting IMHO

reply to this message

#8: ..

by rezonant on 04/14/2009 04:14

Maxime-

I'm listening to 'Odious' now. You're probably right about his style being *more* fitting- especially with our unmetal works. but then there is Eisenstern apparently coming up, perhaps it would work better there?

We tend to move around genres, and most of our newest stuff features little or no guitar (piano... heh, imagine fragging to pianos with breakbeats...), but we have a bunch of harder songs that just didn't make the cut to get uploaded right away.

For those who want to cut through the more melodic MP stuff, check out 'Revolve', 'Wasted Time', and 'Encumbered' (just uploaded a new revision mix which is much better).

reply to this message

#9: Eisenstern - dead?

by a~baby~rabbit on 04/14/2009 05:12

Checking http://eisenstern.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/eisenstern?view=rev reveals that the last version r674 was Dec'08, so did the project die?

reply to this message

#10: Re: ..

by Maxime -Max of S2D- Lebled on 04/14/2009 09:36, refers to #8

Dunno, I'm the one doing the Eisenstern OST, with 25-ish songs so far

reply to this message

#11: Re: Eisenstern - dead?

by Maxime -Max of S2D- Lebled on 04/14/2009 09:38, refers to #9

Well, I guess dev. will restart after the release of the new Sauer edition

reply to this message

#12: Re: ..

by Nixot on 04/14/2009 12:36, refers to #5

I was harping about Fanatic's music being all the same.

Hmm- what's this I see on Mr. van Oortmerssen's website?

"If there is one topic I am quite ignorant about, it is probably music."

Nuff. Said.

reply to this message

#13: Re: ..

by Maxime -Max of S2D- Lebled on 04/14/2009 14:09, refers to #12

Aardappel is not the main dev. anymore

reply to this message

#14: Re: ..

by Nixot on 04/14/2009 14:17, refers to #13

I know, but there was nothing about music on Eihrul's page.

reply to this message

#15: Re: ..

by kripken on 04/14/2009 16:17, refers to #5

Hi rezonant,

I like your music!

I'd be interested in using it in a project of mine, which is a derivative of Sauerbraten. Actually currently I'm putting together the music for the next release (in about a month; website is purposefully down until then, so nothing to link to).

However, I won't use anything with -NC licensing. As a coder (that is, not a lawyer) I don't know what 'noncommercial' means, and I don't want to take any risks: If in a while from now I put Google Adsense on my website to help with costs, am I commercial? Or if I by some chance find someone interested in sponsoring the project? No issue even with the GPL license for code, but -NC is a whole other story.

On the other hand I understand that artists feel safer with -NC, so I won't try to convince you otherwise. I'm just saying how I see things from my perspective.

- kripken

reply to this message

#16: Re: ..

by rezonant on 04/14/2009 17:17, refers to #15

Hello kripken! I'm glad you like our work!!

We chose NC to avoid marketers and other large corporate entities from stealing our music and throwing it into a big budget ad without so much as telling us, let alone paying us for our efforts. It is not intended to stop you from placing advertising on your site.

I wish there were a Creative Commons license that would be Nc only if the project was closed source, but there isn't. That being said, we are 2 broke college students who love open source, and we can promise (as much as words are worth) that we won't sue anyone who makes money via website advertising.

We *can* license the music under the GPL if you prefer, as I'm pretty sure using a GPL song within a work would result in GPL-ification of the work, thus stopping the situation described above while allowing commercial work.

I'm going to put some more thought into the Nc issue and hopefully come back with some more solutions.

reply to this message

#17: ..

by Julius on 04/14/2009 18:41

Yes GPLing the songs in addition would be great!

However I think the -SA of the CC licenses should have pretty much the same effect. Thus the -NC option isn't really needed.

reply to this message

#18: ..

by rezonant on 04/14/2009 19:00

Yeah I was thinking that it probably does as I wrote that. I'll talk to the other half about it.

reply to this message

#19: Re: Eisenstern - dead?

by Hirato Kirata on 04/15/2009 06:53, refers to #11

Eisenstern is dead, abandoned, things started going wrong and everyone just left.

now, we can't actually use the new sauer code without modifying the core engine, and rewriting the majority of the RPG's code
the change from igameclient, igameentities and igameservers, etc. To namespaces obsolete most of it, I've attempted to convert it to the namespace format without success.
So with the new code base, there's little choice except to start from scratch unless anyone with more experience would like to finish what I started (though it's a copy of the "kid friendly sandbox rpg" which is derived from the eisenstern that used to be included with the engine, not that the fork by Nerdfencer and co)

now back on topic.

license wise, to my knowledge the only one of the CC licenses that're currently considered compatible with the gpl is CC-BY-SA (CC V 3.0 and later), which is what I use for the majority of my art work in the sandbox fork of the engine. in part as we have a lite version that's soon to be included with future releases of debian and ubuntu (and have to qualify as "debian free"

~Hirato Kirata

reply to this message

#20: Re: ..

by kripken on 04/15/2009 07:41, refers to #16

"We *can* license the music under the GPL if you prefer, as I'm pretty sure using a GPL song within a work would result in GPL-ification of the work,"

---

I actually believe that is *NOT* the case.

The GPL works using the principle of derivative works. You can combine GPL with non-GPL code, so long as the non-GPL code is not a derivative work of the GPL code. This can happen e.g. if you combine GPL wrapper code with a non-GPL device driver written for Windows (ndiswrapper) - this can't be a derivative work, since it was written for a completely other purpose, completely separately.

Since your songs were created entirely separately from the GPL(-compatible) software it might be combined with, in my opinion it would be a similar situation. If, on the other hand, you wrote the music *FOR* a particular game, and it's tightly coupled to that game style-wise, then that might be a derivative work scenario.

reply to this message

#21: ..

by rezonant on 04/15/2009 19:29

You would probably be right about the GPL not stopping the uses we want to protect.

Using a traditional contract license (but free) wouldn't work as it would be infeasible to properly allow all forks, branches, and reuses.

Would it be sufficient for us to waive the Nc clause for open source projects? If we could provide an amendment to the CC-By-Nc-SA license to allow all works provided under open licenses to use our work for commercial purposes, this would be fine for us.

I've requested some legal assistance from a firm which apparently provides pro bono advice for open artists like us.

reply to this message

#22: Re: ..

by SheeEttin on 04/15/2009 22:15, refers to #21

Of course.
You don't have to confine yourself to a whole cc-by-nc-sa license; you can modify it.

If you want to designate a separate license for open-source projects, you can do just that. It's your work, you can do whatever you want with it.

Of course, I am not a lawyer.

reply to this message

#23: ..

by abcord on 04/16/2009 04:16

You may want to post on Jamendo - they offer a lot of free music, and offer a lot of different licensing options that are well explained.

Generally, include a license that offers you some protection but make it very easy for people to contact you and secure other permissions. To that end, make sure that you use a portable email account like gmail, hotmail, or yahoo that will survive web site transfers and the like.

Nothing sucks more than trying to get ahold of an artist to get permission for something and not having a way to do it because they didn't plan in advance.

reply to this message

#24: ..

by kripken on 04/16/2009 07:51

+1 to SheeEttin's comment: Yes, you can write your own license, or multiple ones. Like CC-BY-NC, and another one saying "In addition, projects distributing their code under an OSI-approved open source license may use this content under the previous license, even if they are legally 'commercial'."

But, it is always best to consult a lawyer for such things, if you have anything serious at stake.

+1 to abcord's comment: Jamendo is a great place to post your music. It's where I look for music for my project. They even have a search option for non -NC licensing :)

reply to this message

#25: ..

by rezonant on 04/16/2009 08:48

We have an account on Jamendo but haven't made use of it because of their rather strange album-based submission model. Soundclick has served wonderfully for getting the content online, and serving it up under CC. We will probably put the songs up on Jamendo at some point but we just haven't yet.

Pros of SoundClick: they allow us to upload an unlimited amount of songs at 128kbps MP3 (with a max size of 10M per song, which is a very, very long song at 128kbps, far bigger than anything we've uploaded so far). It also handles conversion for us, so we upload our 10+mb 320kbps 32bit floating point MP3s and it pops out the hi quality and low quality copies that you see at the site.

Cons of Soundclick: Lots of stuff is for premium members only, though it's very reasonable: $10 a month. Premium members have a 320kbps / 40M per song cap, lots more customization possibilities, etc.

In the middle: There's tons of promotions that you can actually buy from them to increase your music's visibility on the Soundclick website. Admittedly those probably are not the most effective.

abcord: Portable e-mail? (:bewildered:) I thought all enveloped-mails were portable :-P Just to get this out of the way: I'm a software developer, I use Linux, I build computers :-). I have several gmail accounts for various purposes. If you'd like to chat with us, we've already got medusapanacea --.at. gmail dot com.

It seems to be a consensus that a decently-written clause allowing non-Nc usage in open source projects would be acceptable, so I'll work on that over the next X days (finals are rapidly approaching so I apologize in advance for delays). In effect it should allow CC-By-SA or GPLv2/3 licensing for our work for use within larger works covered under OSI-approved or Creative Commons licenses (to handle situations where the rule of derivative works doesn't apply).

I'll probably cement this in by making a torrent with high quality oggs and the license information etc all included (also takes care of getting better-than-128kbps-mp3 quality copies out there).

reply to this message

#26: Re: ..

by kripken on 04/16/2009 09:31, refers to #25

Looking forward to it, and good luck with your finals!

reply to this message

   Board Index