YouTube Audio Library 3

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Often the bottleneck in many assignments that involve video production is the choice of an audio track. Students can spend hours looking for the right song on the Internet, only to find out that they cannot use it because of copyright issues. YouTube Audio Library tackles both problems at once and makes available for download free music for your projects with clearly labeled Creative Commons licenses.

Download Free Music in YouTube Audio Library

Download Music from YouTube Audio Library

YouTube has a formidable built-in library of songs that are perfect for any video projects. You can filter songs by genre, mood, instrument and duration. Popularity is displayed as a thermometer bar for each song and most importantly, a download arrow is the only thing you need to click on to get this file onto your computer.

Jim Sill who shared this tip with us, also pointed out that most songs feature a few seconds of build up which constitutes a perfect intro for your movies.

YouTube Audio Library

For such a wonderful tool, it is somewhat buried in the YouTube interface. The Audio Library is part of YouTube Creator Studio. To find the Audio Library, follow these steps:

1. Click on the 3 hot dogs by the side of the top-left YouTube icon to display the left sidebar if it’s hidden.
2. Click on My Channel.
3. Click on Video Manager above the cover picture of your channel.
4. Click on Create and the Audio Library will be displayed.

YouTube Creator Studio

Sound Effects Library

Additionally, YouTube Audio Library includes sound effects such as the extremely relaxing Afternoon Crickets Long:

Creative Commons License Type

Some of the songs featured in the Audio Library have Creative Commons license. Creative Commons copyright licenses give everyone from individual creators to large companies and institutions a simple, standardized way to grant copyright permissions to their creative work. For students, they give a clear path to understand the conditions under which they can remix a piece of work into their own project.

The license you will find the Audio Library is of the type Attribution (CC BY). This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered.

There are many websites that allow you to download Creative Commons music for free. This one includes an interesting list which features music and a link to search for sound effects.