Shockwave-Sound blog

Tap BPM tempo with our new tool

2012-02-15T12:15:00.000-08:00

We're happy to announce our new online tool: The BPM Tempo Tapper! This nice tool is mostly useful for musicians, producers, DJ's, mixers and media producers who may have the need to find the BPM tempo of a music track. Perhaps you want to use it for a workout music program where you need music of a certain tempo, or you may want to create a visual effect that is synchronized with the beat of the music. Well, look no further. Play the music on your own computer while tapping your mouse or keyboard. Our tempo tapping measurer will keep track of the frequency of your tapping and show you the tempo you're tapping. We hope you'll find this useful!

Artist feature: Adam Skorupa

2012-02-06T13:10:00.000-08:00

Adam Skorupa originally became a Shockwave-Sound.com music composer / contributor because he happened to be a friend and musical collaborator of Shockwave-Sound founder and creator Bjorn Lynne. Ever since our beginning back in April of 2000, Adam's music has been available for licensing here, and we felt it was about time we pestered him with some questions about music, life, royalty-free music licensing and what ever else comes up...

Click here to listen to some of Adam's music while you're reading this interview:

Adam, you’ve been a part of Shockwave-Sound.com ever since the beginning, back in 2000. Was that the first time you were ever involved with any stock music / royalty-free music licensing, and that way of making your music available for use by media producers?

Is it 12 years already? How the time flies. Indeed, Shockwave-Sound.com was the first site, where I’ve had an opportunity to share my work, and after all this time I can state with utmost certainty, that it’s the best site I’ve ever had the chance to collaborate with!

Thank you for the compliment! :-) Do you generally write tracks especially with the meaning of placing the tracks in the Shockwave-Sound.com stock music library, or do you tend to write tracks for specific projects, and then place the tracks in the stock music library afterwards?

The vast majority of the tracks I've placed in your stock music library were composed with this purpose in mind. When ever I’m not working on any commercial projects, and I feel like composing something, I tend to visualize various images which I’ve always wanted to illustrate with sound, but never had an opportunity to. The resulting compositions, in my opinion, are well suited for use in commercial ads for cars, leading edge audio equipment, as well as social networks, community activities or war reports. When they’re being placed in your library, I discreetly hope that your customers might use those tracks in the same context, as the one they were composed in.

Sometimes (but very rarely) I also upload tracks that were originally composed with a particular commercial product in mind, but which in the end, for a variety of reasons, ended up not being used for that project. It would be a great shame to stash them away, because I believe them to be good compositions, which might turn out perfect for utterly different projects (most artists hate stashing away their work).

You are a prolific composer and producer in many different genres and styles (one of my all-time favorite tracks, from any artist, at any time, is the deep techno-trance Hypnosphere). Is there a particular genre of music that you most enjoy working with? Or that you feel you do your best work?

I love challenges, and therefore I often test my skills with yet unfamiliar musical genres. It’s such a great feeling to be able to say about the resultant track, that “it’s not my style... and I quite like it”. Such versatility is obviously also quite desired, when one wants to become a professional, making their living only through composing music. Countless times I was in such a situation, that one day I needed to compose a hard rock piece, and the next day the same customer asked me to prepare for example a children’s lullaby, and then upon completing it, I had to start working for example on a club trance track.

In reply to your question about which genre I most enjoy working with, it’s most certainly film scores. It’s a special genre, which includes almost everything that I love most. First and foremost: orchestral sound, which is the best medium to relay feelings. On the other hand, film score arrangements always leave the composer with complete freedom. The entire rhythm section may be electronic or rock, or even, for that matter, ethnic. It’s a great genre, which enables me to combine all the styles that fascinate me the most at a given moment in time.

Have you ever come across your music by surprise in a game, TV broadcast or other media? Perhaps some case where a client had licensed your music from Shockwave-Sound.com and used it in their project... which you happened to come across and hear your own music by surprise?

Yes, it happened a couple of times actually. I have heard my music in game trailers, television commercials, shopping centers, and even iPhone games. Every time it happened, it made a mind-blowing impression. I felt proud, that someone wanted to use my music for their project, because for me this was proof, that someone truly liked it!

Besides obviously handling samplers, synths and keyboards with great skill, do you ever record live performed instruments in your compositions? If so, which instruments and who are the performers?

Recently I had a chance to record with a 150-piece live ensemble (full orchestra and double choir). See how it sounds:

Real live orchestral performance of Adam's music for "The Witcher 2"

There are times, when I work with smaller orchestra ensembles (mainly strings). I also record vocals (despite the fact, that I do not compose songs, I often need some forms of vocal expression in my work). I also quite frequently collaborate with my friend, Olek Grochocki, who’s an absolute master of the guitar, and is able to play any genre to my heart’s desire.

Let’s do a different twist on the “5 island albums” where you would normally tell us the 5 CD’s you’d take with you to a desert island... Let’s instead do it with music production hardware and software. If you could take only 5 items of music production tools... hardware or software... which 5 would you bring?

A PC
Cakewalk Sonar (I need something to record with)
A keyboard (any keyboard with a MIDI connector would do)
Symphobia (to be able to produce orchestral sounds)
WinRar (in order for my compositions to fit into bottles, which I would then throw into the sea).

Your best-selling track here at Shockwave-Sound.com over the past year is this track, Familiarize. Do you have any explanation or thoughts about why people seem to go for that track and want to use it in their media projects?

Perhaps simply because it’s good? :) But seriously, I think this track is so popular, because it’s so uniquely universal. It may be received as very affirmative (bringing hope, showing the good aspects of life to date), as well as sad (nostalgic, melancholic). Its arrangement is quite modern, which enables it to be used for example in leading edge hardware or revolutionary technology presentations. In general, this track may simply be associated with everything you can imagine. I would also hereby like to ask those, who have used this track in their productions, to send me a link via e-mail. I’m dying of curiosity, wondering how it was used in practice!

How come you ended up as a composer/producer, and not something completely different like a plumber or a fireman, or anything else? What brought you to a career in music and making a livelihood as a composer? That is a dream for many, but few, very few, ever manage to realize it. Did you always plan on being a composer/producer?

I was simply very lucky, and ended up in the right place, at the right time. I almost became an electronics engineer, because that’s what my education was leading to. Fortunately, I came across the right people, who saw some potential in me, and supported me when I made my first steps into composing music. :)

I know that you also compose a lot of bespoke music, in other words, compose music especially for unique / individual projects, such as short films, TV commercials and video games. Can you name some of the most interesting projects you have worked on; where we may hear your music?

I’m probably most recognizable thanks to my work on the soundtrack of “The Witcher” and “The Witcher 2” games. If you’d like to, please have a look at the latest trailer, which includes my compositions as well: www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwUAv-SSZqw. I would also like to recommend a very emotional short animated feature, called “The Kinematograph”: www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwYToSP8V8o. It made me very proud to be able to participate in the development of a film devoted to international promotion of Poland and its culture. I was honored with a chance to compose a track for an 8-minute animated clip depicting the history of Poland: www.youtube.com/watch?v=qr6Q0BpmyG0. I am also the author of music used in a clip that was made to promote the beginning of Polish presidency in the European Parliament: www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YYHekN7qco&feature=fvsr.

If anybody reading this would be interested in hiring your services to compose and produce new music especially for them, would you be interested in taking such jobs?

Most certainly. If you’re reading this interview, and you believe that my work fits your requirements, do not hesitate to contact me via Shockwave-Sound.com

We thank Adam for his time and his insights.. but most of all for his great music!

(c)2012 Shockwave-Sound.com. All rights reserved.

Shockwave-Sound.com music in non-profit New York art education

2012-01-20T00:01:00.000-08:00

Leading Leaders is a non-profit educational organization that teaches kids about art, understanding art, and helping kids express themselves and their feelings through art. Our music is featured in this really nice YouTube film documenting the project. In the film we get to learn about the project and to hear some insights from teachers, volunteers and students alike.

The music you can hear throughout the film is the track Day After Day composed by Pawel Blaszczak. A royalty-free music track which - as you can see from the film - is not fingerprinted by YouTube, not in a Content ID program, and thus does not cause the video to be sullied by advertising or nasty copyright warnings from YouTube. (This is the case with all our music. We do not fingerprint our music - see this article for details.)

The film itself was created with the help of Peter Galperin and David Frieberg at Significant Films, a creative company that produces short films for big events. Highly original, engaging, theme-based films that entertain and inspire at special events, or online.

Paypal turning the screw...

2011-12-08T00:35:00.001-08:00

At Shockwave-Sound.com we represent about 150 different music composers/producers who receive their royalties from us quarterly. We've been using Paypal Mass Pay to pay out their royalties and the Paypal fee for this has been capped at $1 per recipient. So when we sent out royalties to 150 receivers, it cost us $150. No problem.

Last month however, Paypal massively increased the fee for sending Mass Pay, to 2% of the value of the payment, up to a max of $45 per recipient. This means that when we now pay out royalties to 150 composers, it costs us over $1,000 in Paypal FEE for one Mass Pay. This represents a price increase overnight over several hundred percent!

The Mass Pay function is a fully automated operation that nobody in Paypal has to lift a finger to make happen. As a Paypal user we do the whole operation ourselves, using our Paypal account screen. It seems excessive to me, for Paypal to charge over $1,000 in fee for one automated process.

Looks like Paypal are starting to realize some of the monopoly they have on this market and is starting to maximize profit by blackmail type fees. :-(

Ironically, it's still slightly cheaper than sending 150 international bank wire transfers, and of course, the Paypal Mass Pay is a lot less work.

We have communicated this with our composers and they have kindly agreed to share the new 2% Paypal fee with us, so we are now paying 1% and the composers the other 1%, and I guess we can just about live with that.

Hanzi Warrior game with royalty-free Chinese music

2011-11-03T02:01:00.000-07:00

From time to time we like to give a mention to a project where we feel that our customer has used our music in a cool way, or in a nice project. One such project is the new iPhone and iPod Touch game, "Hanzi Warrior", up for release on 11/11/11, including our royalty-free Chinese music track "Zhongdu".

Hanzi Warrior is a neat game in which you can learn Chinese and save the earth! Gong Gong has created a hole in the sky. Yellow Dragon holds the key to repair the sky. There are over 28 worlds across five realms. Unite the winds to summon Yellow Dragon.
Learn Chinese, Save the Earth, and have a great time doing it. An entertaining and educational game for iPhone and iPad.

We thank the developers, Difint, for using our music in this cool game, and we'd like to suggest you check out the game trailer video at YouTube.

Some thoughts behind our 'Suggested Production Types'

2011-10-31T13:54:00.000-07:00

The "Suggested Production Types" music browsing tool is something that we introduced to our site quite recently. We used to have just a list of Music Genres (Jazz, Rock, Classical, Ambient...) and nothing else. But searching for the right music for your project can be more complicated than that. You may not know exactly which "music genre" you are looking for. You may simply be looking for something - anything - that works for your project.

This is why we introduced the Suggested Production Types. You can find this as a Browse button in the music browsing tool on the right-hand side of our site. Click on Suggested Production Types and you'll be able to click on things like "Relaxation, Spa & Indulgence" or "Spy, Secret Agent, Undercover" and more, to bring up a list of music tracks that we felt would work well in those types of productions - regardless of the actual music genre of that track.

Additionally, we've written a page where we illustrate and explain a little bit about what we mean by the various "Suggested Production Types" and what criteria we've used when selecting music tracks for each of them. A little bit of background as to what makes certain music / sounds work well for a particular genre of production, be it a video game, TV show, YouTube video, or any other media.

Should you be interested in reading about each of our Suggested Production Types and the thought process behind them, click here. Hope you enjoy it.

Have Yourself A Merry Royalty-Free Christmas

2011-10-25T08:10:00.000-07:00

It's almost Christmas time again and we can see that time coming, as people start buying royalty free Christmas music from our catalogue. Tracks like "We Wish You a Merry Christmas", "Jingle Bells", "Silent Night" and "O Come All Ye Faithful" are so popular that many of our composers have made their own versions of these, from the straightforward and cosy to the cool and funked-up, to the downright silly. We also have a lot of Christmas music that aren't actually traditional or well-known tracks, but that are new, original compositions made by our own composers in a Christmas style. We call this area New & Fun Christmas Music so if you're looking for something a little bit different for this year's Christmas presentation or electronic Christmas greeting card, you may want to check out those tracks.

But where are the other famous Christmas classics, such as Let it Snow, Let it Snow, Let it Snow and others? What about Walking In A Winter Wonder Land? Why don't we have it? We get customers writing in and asking about these tracks and about why they can't find them on our site. It seems odd for us to have 66 search results for "Jingle Bells", but nothing for other famous Christmas classics like the two I just mentioned and Frosty the Snowman? What's up with that?

The simple answer is, that these "missing" Christmas tracks are under copyright and therefore cannot be offered up as royalty free music / stock music / library music, by anyone. In contrast to "We Wish You A Merry Christmas" and "Jingle Bells" where the actual compositions are in the public domain, and only the recording and arrangement is in copyright to who ever actually created that recording -- these other tracks including Frosty the Snowman have the actual composition still under copyright to the authors and their publishers. Therefore, these tracks cannot be done up as royalty-free music and this explains why you can't find them here, or indeed on any other music licensing website:

Frosty the Snowman
Holly Jolly Christmas
Let it Snow
Santa Claus Is Coming To Town
Walking in the Winter Wonderland
Rocking Around the Christmas Tree
...and others

We are a little bit bummed out about this, because several years ago we actually spent quite a lot of time and energy on making our own arrangements and versions of these tracks, and we have some pretty good recordings of these tracks that we've played and made ourselves. We wrongly assumed that these compositions were public domain until just before we were going to start selling them from our site.

Anyway, for those of you who were looking for this, and possibly other Christmas tunes that you can't find on our site -- that is the explanation. Merry Christmas!

2011-10-21T03:29:00.000-07:00

Lifeyo has made a cool Content Management System / Website building tool that makes it easy and fun to make your own website and blog. Putting together the YouTube video that demonstrates their service, they came to Shockwave-Sound.com for royalty-free music. We really liked the video and thought we'd post it here too.

Notice that Shockwave-Sound.com's music is not in a Content ID program at YouTube and therefore does not cause advertising for a competing brand to appear on Lifeyo's YouTube video.

The music track used in this video is "Spirit" composed by Dan Gautreau. We felt the music worked really well in their video and thank Lifeyo for using our music. Two thumbs up from us!

Finding your picked tracks on a different computer

2011-10-09T01:02:00.000-07:00

We are occasionally asked how it's possible to make a list of favorite tracks, and then find that list on a different computer. You may be browsing music from home and wish to make a list of bookmarked tracks that you would like to come back to when you're in your office, to actually make the purchase from there.

As you may have noticed, our site does not have "user accounts" and does not require that you set up an account, or log into an account, before making a purchase. We have considered this several times, but we feel that a lot of customers like that about our site - that they can just come, browse, place an order. All without having to create a user account first.

However, not having any user accounts, we have no way of tracking a person from their home computer to their work computer. But there is still a way that you can create a list of favorite tracks from home, and then access that list from your work computer, by using Mozilla Firefox web browser.

[Click on the actual track title to be
taken to a page for that track specifically]

The Firefox browser has a feature called "Firefox Sync" which lets you create a Sync Account with Firefox, and all your bookmarks, log in information, saved passwords, etc. will be stored within that account. So you can have all your bookmarks and other such information shared between your computers. I'm using that feature myself and it's really great. If I bookmark a page on my office PC, I can see that bookmark on my laptop when I'm traveling.

If you want to bookmark a specific music track, simply click on the track title. That will take you to a page that specifically displays only that one track. The URL for that page looks something like: www.shockwave-sound.com/track/xxxx (where the x'es represent the track ID number in our catalog). While viewing this page, you can Bookmark the page and easily find this track later. And if you're using Firefox Sync feature, you can see that bookmark on all your synced computers. So when you start up Firefox on your work computer, you'll see the track bookmarked there.

Royalty Free Music for Weather Channel / Weather Forecast

2011-09-29T00:42:00.000-07:00

We've added a new "Suggested Production Type" to the music browsing tools at Shockwave-Sound.com: "Weather Forecast". Here we present music that we feel goes well with TV Weather Forecasts; you know the type you can see on CNN and other broadcasters where they just display the weather in different parts of the world. Here are 74 music tracks highly suited for this particular use. Enjoy. :-) . The below link is a bit long, but you get the same result just by going to our main front page, clicking on "Suggested Production Types" and then clicking on "Weather Forecast".
http://www.shockwave-sound.com/newprop_track_list.php?prop_ref=43&type=production_genres&matching=ANY

New preview player with waveform display

2011-09-08T03:25:00.000-07:00

We've designed and released a new and updated preview audio player here at Shockwave-Sound. The new player features a graphic waveform display so that you can see where the music gets louder and quieter. Useful if you need to plan the use of the music in your project, how it will match up with your scenes etc.

Remember that according to our music licensing terms, you are welcome to cut, chop, crop, fade, and stretch our music to fit your required cue-lengths. So with a bit of insight and knowledge, perhaps some reasonably good editing software, you can always make the music fit your cues and lengths (for example, getting that musical climax at exactly the right time on your movie timeline).

We hope you'll enjoy this new and updated preview player - it's just one of the many site upgrades and improvements we've done over the past 6 months or so.

Shockwave-Sound.com music making good in Aralon

2011-09-03T10:34:00.000-07:00

From time to time we get whiff of a project where we think our music is part of something really pretty cool, so we want to brag about it a little bit. :-)

Aralon: Sword and Shadow HD is a role playing game for the iPhone and iPad that looks and plays more like what we've got used to from the PC, X-Box, Mac and Playstation over the last few years. Developed by Crescent Moon Games, Aralon features HD graphics, lots of quests, character customization, mounts, dungeons and caves and pretty much everything you've come to expect from a good quality fantasy RPG. There's a full inventory system, various fighting techniques and you can play as a Human, Elf or Troll.

Crescent Moon Games licensed royalty-free music from Shockwave-Sound.com including the fantasy / medieval style music track Fairy Winds composed by Bjorn Lynne and several others for this great iPad game. Check it out in the Apple App Store: Aralon: Sword and Shadow HD

Mess FilmMakers film, shot with a cellphone

2011-08-24T00:24:00.000-07:00

It's pretty cool what you can do these days, armed only with a cellphone, a lot of time and talent, and of course, access to a good quality stock music library and voiceover talents. :-)

Luis Mieses from Zaragoza, Spain - aka Mess FilmMakers - has produced two really cool trailers / short films. We think he shows a lot of talent as a film maker.

Pray For Dawn is made as a teaser/trailer for a mystery crime / thriller:

The Fixer is more of a short film, this is the one that was shot entirely on a cellphone camera:

In both films, Shockwave-Sound.com provided the royalty-free music as well as all voice / voiceover acting.

It's fun to see our music and our voice over recordings used with such talent and gusto. Well done, Luis, and good luck with your carreer as a film maker!

New look track display with "Find Similar Tracks"

2011-08-06T03:51:00.000-07:00

Hello folks,

About a month ago we launched our new, powerful music browsing tool. This weekend we are pretty pleased with ourselves again ;-) because we are unveiling our new style track display. The new track design can be seen by browsing or searching any music on our site, and it looks like the picture on the left, with the new black headings for track titles and new-look "play" buttons. We hope you like it! Besides looking a bit cleaner, it is also more optimized and streamlined than the old design, so track display pages should now load a bit faster.

The real improvement here, though, lies in the [Find Similar] link that you can find on the bottom frame of each track displayed. Clicking on this link brings up our powerful Advanced Browse too, pre-filled with details of the track you were looking at - such as: Music genre, tempo-feel, moods/emotions, prominent instruments and suggested production types. From here, you can either tweak the criteria as you wish, or you can simply hit that "Submit" button and a new "Advanced Browse" will take place that looks for tracks with similar configurations as the original track. This should give you a new track listing with a whole set of tracks that should pretty much match up with the track you were looking at first.

Play around with it! We think you'll like it. If you encounter any problems with it, be sure to let us know. And thanks for using Shockwave-Sound.com!

Happy Birthday To You - royalty free music? Actually, no...

2011-07-29T11:29:00.000-07:00

We got a call from a customer who was looking to buy the classic "Happy Birthday To You" song as royalty-free music. We didn't have the track and at first both the customer and myself found it a bit odd. But I found out that in fact this track is still under copyright to two old ladies in Florida and therefore, that track cannot be purchased as royalty-free music / stock music. We would be breaking copyright if we were to offer it -- even if we made our own arrangement and recording of it, because the actual composition itself is in copyright.

We have this "alternative Happy Birthday Song" instead:
http://www.shockwave-sound.com/track/10367

Okay, it may be a bit cheesy, but if you're making something like an electronic greeting card or just an office fun project, I think it really hits the spot. Happy Birthday!

Browse music by historical eras

2011-07-26T05:21:00.000-07:00

We're always working on improving and diversifying the ways that you can browse and search for music here at Shockwave-Sound.com, and this week we've added the possibility to browse for retro music by decade.

By clicking on Suggested Production Types you can see a panel similar to the one shown here on the left. You will see various "Historical / Retro:" selections including:

1980's: The era of the electro pop and a continuation of the "later era Disco" that was started in the 70's. Also, soul (Motown) and AOR Rock music was prominent in this era.

1970's: The era of Motown, Disco and Funk, when pants had flares and the Bee Gees ruled Boogie Town.

1960's: The era of peace and love, free love and free sex, when hippies set the musical order and pop & rock music took on Beatles'esque sounds and psychedelic colors. Also prominent in this era was the Bossa Nova and smooth latin chill-out music.

1950's: When Buddy Holly, Elvis Presley and Bill Haley & the Comets ruled the world. This was the era of the Rockabilly, along with classic Jazz sounds

1920-1940's: This was the era of happy jazz music, Dixieland and Charleston, but also Gospel, Blues and early Hollywood type orchestral film music.

Older / History Channel etc: This is where you'll find music that we felt would be suitable for general Historical programmes, historical documentaries, world history / heritage and so on. Much of this music is pretty "ambient" in that it would work well simply as background music to storytelling, documentary film etc.

Remember that you can Combine one of the above selections with other criteria, by using the Advanced Browse feature. For example, you can choose to browse music from the 1970's which is also marked with having a "Happy" mood. Or, you can choose to browse music from the 1920-40's which feature a trumpet. There are many, many such possibilities available to you from within our Advanced Browsing tool, which you can read more about here.

New ways of browsing for music at Shockwave-Sound.com

2011-07-05T03:16:00.000-07:00

We're very happy and excited to announce the new music browsing tool here at Shockwave-Sound.com.

Our site and music catalog has come a long way since the first beginnings back in April 2000 and it was no longer enough to simply be able to look at a music genre and see hundreds or even a thousand tracks listed in that genre. We needed to give you better ways to browse and find music by other criteria than just the genre itself, and to be able to more precisely define exactly what you're looking for.

So we gathered a team of some 7-8 people who spent a few weeks going back over all our 10,000 tracks, listened carefully to each track and ticked various Moods/Emotions (e.g. Sad, Happy, Excited etc), Suggested Production Types (e.g. Crime TV, Underwater video, Wedding video, etc.), Prominent Instruments (e.g. Acoustic piano), Tempo-feel (e.g. "slow"), and BPM tempo (e.g. 132) for every track. It was a big job, but we had a good team of people and we finished it in about 2 weeks.

We then developed the tool you can see on the left. The 5 blue buttons represent "simple browsing"; you just click that button, select a Mood or Instrument etc., and the track listing comes up immediately. Depending on which criteria you click, the resulting track list can be just a few, or several hundred, a couple of thousand, tracks.

"Advanced Browse" is where you can really harvest the power and flexibility of our new tool. Here you can combine various criteria from all of the other "simple" options to create very accurate track listings reflecting exactly what you want. It can be something relatively simple, like "I want children's music, it should be happy, and it should feature a xylophone", or it can be very complex and precise, like "I want acoustic piano and violin, I want it to be sorrowful, I want it to have very slow tempo, I want it not to be classical music, and I want it to be suitable for use in drama". The tool really gives you a lot of power, as you can combine many different types of criteria and every criteria can be negated to create a "not" out of it too. So you can look for "Smooth jazz, slow tempo, not containing saxophone".

At the bottom of the tool, you can make a quick search, or you can get to the Advanced Search page where you can search for keywords, titles, sound effects, CD collections and more by using various search criteria to find your music.

If you encounter any problems with the browsing tool, any crashes or unexpected results, please let us know about it by using our contact form. Thanks!

Royalty-Free music with real orchestra

2011-06-28T05:42:00.000-07:00

The state of royalty free music / stock music has come a long way since the rather bland, generic sounding electronic tracks of the 1980's. As the music library business has "grown up" so to speak, the talent, effort, time and money put into library music recordings have increased gradually.

We are now at a situation where some of our stock music actually features real live philharmonic orchestras. We think it's pretty amazing. We took in 5 new such real live orchestra tracks yesterday and that's what prompted us to write this little article - even though it's by no means the first time we have this type of content in our catalog.

Of course, we already have a huge catalogue of classical music featuring hundreds of tracks with real live orchestras. But increasingly, we are adding new compositions, non-classical works, film soundtracks and dramatic background music for movies, games and more, which are fully or partially recorded with live philharmonic orchestras.

Yesterday we added these some great tracks by John Herberman, and among them was this really amazing track called Vindication:

With its stabbing strings and horns, big booming timpani / orchestral percussion, this track is full of drama, guts and glory, aggression and pure fear, this track will go extremely well with an action scene, sci-fi or fantasy fight / battle, or all-out war. It will make the hairs in your neck stand up straight. If you want to license Vindication for use in your production, follow this link or just search for it by title.

Another track with perhaps a more "longing" sense, of dark drama, intrigue, intensity and orchestral climax, is this track called Return of the Warrior:

A truly beautiful track featuring real live orchestra, fragile string sections with grand, swelling crescendi. If you'd like to license this track for your film, game or other projects, follow this link or just search for it by title.

Moving on, we have this much softer track, of amazement and beauty: By Golden Pond:

Again, recorded with a real live philharmonic orchestra, this beautiful and poignant track will go well in a family movie, romantic drama or other touching, personal or thoughtful stories. I can't imagine a better track for, say, a charity appeal or a cosy, touching, childrens story. If you would like to license this track
for use in your project, follow this link or just search for the track by its title.

All the above 3 tracks were composed by John Herberman - he has more too - here is a link to all John Herberman tracks.

But John is by no means the only one who's done tracks with live orchestras.We already have the team of Dick De Benedictis (famous TV- and film composer for many years - check out his page at Internet Movie Database) and Thomas Stobierski, some 50 years his junior. Together they combined the classical, orchestral skills of Dick with the hi-tech, electronic, cutting-edge sound of Thomas, to create some pretty awesome music that crosses over between real live orchestra / Hollywood sound and the gritty, edgy sound of today's hip-hop, electronica, industrial and funk music. Here are some of their great tracks:

Rebellion - awesome for war, fighting, chase, sci-fi / space battle etc:

And here's one called The Toll, also featuring a real live orchestra combined with industrial / electronic / cutting-edge production techniques:

Those are two of the many great orchestral / edgy crossover tracks by De Benedictis & Stobierski. To see their full track listing - a lot of great tracks for science fiction, action, sports and more - click here.

In this blog post we've given you a small taste of the many different royalty-free tracks we have that utilize the dynamics and power of the live orchestra. You can't really beat it with synthesizers and samplers - even though, I admit - you can get pretty close.

For a full overview of live orchestra recordings, see the Classical Music section, and also try these search terms in the search box: Live orchestra , Real orchestra , philharmonic orchestra, orchestral (the last one there will also bring up tracks made with samplers and synthesizers approximating the sound of symphonic orchestras.

Track # 10,000 reached at Shockwave-Sound.com

2011-06-08T04:10:00.000-07:00

On June 7, 2011, we added track #10,000 to our royalty free music catalog. Track number ten thousand in our database was given to this rather nice & evocative piece of neo-classical piano + orchestra track by Yuri Sazonoff: http://www.shockwave-sound.com/track/10000

At the time of writing this, it's about 24 hours later and right now we have 10,033 tracks.

Download multiple files in one big download

2011-06-02T00:29:00.000-07:00

We're happy to announce our "download page re-zipper". This custom engineered little piece of software is now presented on your download page if you have ordered multiple products. Instead of downloading each sound file by itself, you can now click "Select All" and then click "Download selected files as one big .zip file".

Our server will unzip each individual file that you have purchased, re-zip them all into one big .zip file, and hand this file over to your browser - for saving to your hard drive. Once downloaded, you simply unzip it and find all your purchased files inside.

This feature will be particularly useful for those who purchase "All sounds" in a sound effects package (typically 25-50 sounds) or "All versions" of a track that exist in many different edits / versions / mixes. We hope you'll enjoy this new feature. Just one of the several things we are doing this spring/summer to upgrade and improve our site for our customers.

Higher sound quality previews on our older tracks

2011-05-27T05:57:00.000-07:00

Back in the day (i.e. before 2010) ;-) we used to create all our preview audio files in 56-kbps MP3 format, with a "preview.... shockwave-sound...." voice that was mixed in at a fixed volume.

From about December 2010 onwards we started making our preview audio in 128-kbps MP3 files (higher fidelity, more clarity) and also with a "preview.... shockwave-sound..." voice that was both mixed at a lower volume generally, and that also changes in volume dynamically depending on how loud the music is at the moment. So if there is a really quiet part in the music, the preview voice is also at a low volume. And vice versa.

This did however leave our older tracks sounding a bit "second grade". There were some 5,500 tracks, all with multiple versions / edits / mixes, and a total of 38,770 "old" preview files on our server, and with a bit-rate of only 56 kbps and with a preview voice that was, at times, way too loud, these tracks just didn't sound as attractive as our newer tracks.

Anyway - we have now just finished the rather large task of updating all those 38,770 older preview files to the "new" format. We had some good people working on automating this task, so it wasn't as bad as we had feared. It took us a few days of audio file processing, plus about 10 hours of solid uploading. Now all our tracks - old and new - have preview files with a nice clarity of sound, and a preview voice that shouldn't be too obtrusive.

Just one of the several upgrades and improvements we are working on here at Shockwave-Sound.com this spring/summer.

Upgrades & improvements coming to Shockwave-Sound.com

2011-05-16T05:19:00.000-07:00

Dear Shockwave-Sound.com users / customers,

When we first started Shockwave-Sound.com back in April of 2000 (now more than 11 years ago), the site contained basically only a few music tracks by founder/creator Bjorn Lynne, himself a musician with a nose for the emerging royalty-free music market. Everything was run pretty much manually, with Bjorn himself, or his wife, emailing with each customer individually and manually sending them the files they had purchased

In the spring of 2005 the site contained almost 1,000 different tracks, by about 30 different composers with whom Bjorn had made a deal to sell their music through this site. At this time, the software that runs the site "behind the scenes" was totally overhauled and basically created again from scratch. Now the site was given the technology needed to deliver files automatically to customers and to automatically create License Documents for each customer.

It's now the spring of 2011 and apart from a few minor tweaks and fixes, Shockwave-Sound.com has basically, pretty much run on all the same technology for all these years since 2005. We've added a few things to help us along, such as the [My Orders] page where customers go any time to recover old orders and re-download them any time they want. But by now, the site has a catalog of approx. 10,000 tracks, with some 100-200 new tracks being added each new month. We've realized that the old search / browse structure is no longer enough, on its own, for customers to make a good and precise music search.

We we've gathered a whole team of talented people and we are now working on several upgrades & improvements to the site. These will include:

Ability to browse for music not only by Music Genre, but also by Moods/Emotions, Suggested Production Types, Tempo-feel, BMP-tempo and Prominent Instruments of each track.
For those who have ordered many files in one order, they will be able to "re-pack" all their downloadable files into one big .zip file, from their download page - enabling customers to download many files in one big download .zip file.
We're going to go back over all older tracks on the site and re-code the preview files so that the "preview... shockwave-sound..." voice becomes quieter, less obtrusive, and also with a higher fidelity on the preview files. We used to do them in 56-kbps MP3 format, we're now doing them in 128-kbps MP3, and this is what we're going to re-encode all preview files to.
Finally, the visual presentation of tracks on the site will be simplified somewhat and we'll try our best to make it quicker and easier to listen to the next track, the next track, the next track...

These are all things that we will be rolling out over the next few weeks and months here at Shockwave-Sound.com, and we hope to have most of our new stuff active on the live website by the end of the summer 2011.

Right now, we have 7 guys working on listening to all 10,000 tracks in detail, one by one, and inputting additional data about each track, including Moods/Emotions, BPM tempo, Tempo-feel, Suggested Production Types, and Major Instruments. In fact, as I write this, it's almost completed.

We'd like to take this opportunity to thank all our users, visitors, partners and friends up through the years for their interest in our music and for making Shockwave-Sound.com such a successful business. We're 11 years old, and quite literally, we can't wait for the next 11!

Shockwave-Sound.com music boogies down on X-Box

2011-05-15T00:58:00.000-07:00

Check out some of Shockwave-Sound.com's music used in a very cool way, in Avatar Boogie 2. Is it a game? Is it a show? Is it a dance video? I guess it's all of these and more! Watch your own X-box avatar dance the night away with funky moves from ballet to funk, from disco to air guitar, all set to music from Shockwave-Sound.com in a really cool way. Check out the free trial version at the X-Box Marketplace.

Cross-promote your video / game / film / website / project with us

2011-05-10T01:07:00.000-07:00

Here at Shockwave-Sound.com we love to cross-promote with our customers, so if you write up a little story/article on your website or blog, we will do the same for you on our blog. Our site is visited by over 4,500 different/unique visitors every day and is a very active place with a lot of media people reading it, so we guarantee that it will be good promotion for you.

Should you be interested in this, please go ahead and write a little something on your website or blog that includes us. Perhaps something about why you chose this music track, why you licensed it from our site, how you feel it matches or fits into your project, and how you worked the integration between your project and the music. Basically just anything that tells a little story about Shockwave-Sound.com and the how / why / when you used us. Include a working web link to our website: http://www.shockwave-sound.com (that is a requirement). Here is a .zip file with our graphic logo in various formats, should you need it.

Then contact us and tell us about your article. Also tell us about your project / film / game / what ever type of product you've made, and we will be happy to give it a good plug on our website - including a picture or two, if you like. And we'll link to your website, video or product.

We're looking forward to writing about your baby!

Why we don't allow artists to sing, rap, or play instruments on our music

2011-01-07T08:00:00.000-08:00

Some of you may have noticed that the Terms and conditions under which you buy music from us has a chapter that says "You may not create derived musical works" from our music. What this means in plain language is that, if you are a singer, rapper, or other musical artist, you may not sing, rap, or play musical instruments on top of our music. You cannot buy a royalty-free music track from us, write your own lyrics, and sing/rap those lyrics on our music. We don't allow it. And as a customer, you have to accept those terms, in order to actually proceed to the checkout/payment page on our site.

Earlier today I got an email from a guy who just couldn't understand the reasoning behind this policy. Why don't we allow people to sing, rap, or play instruments on our music? It seems an unreasonable policy?

To try to explain, this policy is in place to avoid confusion, disputes and long negotiations over rights. If a singer was allowed to download our music, come up with his own melody on top of that, his own lyrics, and sing that melody on our music – maybe play a guitar solo too – then who, now, owns the rights to that song?

If that artist now wants to put that music on a CD album and have that sold as CD’s through his own website, and maybe on iTunes, who should get paid for that, and how much? Should we ask that artist to start paying us half of the income calculated on a pro-rata basis according to how many tracks we he’s got on that CD which was partly built on ours? Should we ask the artist to keep track of exactly how many copies of each track has been sold through iTunes, Rhapsody, Spotify, PayPlay, Napster, CDBaby and dozens of other online music stores, so that he can accurately calculate our shares of those particular tracks? And then pay those shares to us, quarterly, for all foreseeable future? Should we trust potentially hundreds or thousands of independent artists/songwriters (who are notoriously disorganized) to do this consciously, accurately, and persistently over many years?

I think you can see the world of problems and complexities that this would open up. It gets very complicated very quickly, and we do not wish to get into that kind of “market”. There is no way that we could ever follow-up hundreds, thousands, of disorganized "artist types" and make sure that we have contracts with them with shared ownership of musical recordings, payment of royalties and shares that they should be paying us, and so on.

Therefore, we allow our music to be used only "as it is". We do not allow our music to be used as a basis on which other artists can sing, play, etc.

If you only want to sing, play, rap, whatever on our music in the privacy of your own home, we don't have a problem with it. But the resulting recording that combines your talent with our music must not be distributed on the internet, on CD, or in any other way.