A way to pick great music for your project

[Shrimpfarmer]

Here is a gem folks

We all know that the right music can transform your images and turn great clips into a truly emotional experience. But how do you pick the right music? Well here is my way of doing this and it works more often than not for me and my audience.

First - collect music of every different kind possible and not just what you particularly like to listen to. I find the cheapest way of doing this is by buying second hand CD's from charity shops and car boot sales. It helps to take a portable CD player with you so that you can listen to some of the tracks. When you listen to a track ask yourself what does the music make you think of? If it evokes particular memories or emotions its probably one for your collection.

Second - make sure that you rip all of your cd's to a digital music library on your computer. Rip them in the highest quality possible and using the free windows media player is just fine for this, however I would change the recording format to MP3 rather than WMA as its such a portable format. Once you have them in digital form you never have to hunt around your cd's again which takes a lot of hassle out of choosing your music track.

Third - download and install the killer weapon in choosing the right music, a free piece of software called MusicIP mixer. http://www.musicip.com/mixer/index.jsp Point this amazing piece of software to where you have stored your music collection. It will analyse all of your music and that's when the fun begins folks. Imagine you have a particular song that you love but you have already used it in another video. Just click on that song and ask MusicIP Mixer to create a mix based on it. It will instantly find you all of your songs that are similar and that compliment that track.

Fourth - Don't have any pre-conceptions about what type of music you want to put to your film. Clear your mind and be open to creative suggestion. Assemble your clips into a rough order and arrange your screen so that you can see your video playing and the MusicIP screen. Here comes the magic.....

Fifth - MusicIP has a little green man icon in the lower left of its screen. When you click that it will randomly select a track from your library and play it. You can configure it to play a section for as long as you like before moving onto another one. It plays a track about 30 seconds in so you get a good sense of what its like. If you instantly don't like it click the green forward icon and something else will be played totally randomly. OK, play your film and watch the pictures. Hit the green man and keep clicking the green forwards arrow until you hear something you feel has an emotional connection with your film. At that point hit the green man again and you will be presented with a selection of tracks based on the one you like. Use the blue arrow keys to listen to this selection. Repeat the process noting down any possible candidates on the way.

I usually get the right mix in under 10 minutes. I have 5,457 tracks in my library of everything you could imagine. Try it and you may be as amazed as I was when I discovered the program. Its also just great when you want to listen to music but can't think what to play.

Enjoy

[Bobby]

Interesting Shrimp - thank you!

[ed]

I tend to use music that has meaning to me, reminding me of past periods and people in my life, when I use an artist's music.

[Steve Grisetti]

Great tips, guys!

[George Tyndall]

Here is a gem folks .... Enjoy

Shrimpfarmer, thanks for sharing this “gem.”

Although I had some difficulty discerning the similarity of the songs in the program’s mixes, I still found this program (the Basic=Free version) tremendously helpful to my work flow.

First, I do mostly “music videos” that consist of still portraits set to music, in other words, slide shows. When I’ve gotten to the point in my work flow that all my slides are on the Timeline in the PSE7 editor, I experiment with different slide and transition durations until I see what appears to be the proper rhythm for this particular set of slides. Then I look at the lower-left portion of the Timeline to determine the total length of the show.

Once I know the total length of the show, I open the MusicIP Mixer Library and then click on the Length column, which orders my “favorite slide show music library” according to the length of each song. I will typically find at least a dozen that have durations of 30-45 seconds longer than the length of my slide show. (I need the extra seconds for the Introductory and End materials of the show.) At this point it is a very simple matter to, one by one, play back each of the selections on the PSE7 Editor’s Timeline.

Most of the time, I will stumble upon a song that seems to naturally fit with the show, in other words, the rhythm of the slides and transitions appears to move nicely with the music–and the result is that I do not need to do any music-slide synchronizing once I have outputted the slide show to the PRE7 Timeline.

Secondly, another very helpful feature of MusicIP Mixer was the removal of duplicate songs–the program worked much better than iTunes, which is the program I use to manage all my music (not just favorite slide show music), and this saved me a lot of HDD space, as all my slide show music is in WAV format.

Finally, thanks for explaining the little green man in the lower-left of the program. If I’ve been unable to find a song match using the above method, that green man is tremendously helpful for the purpose of moving through my MusicIP Mixer Library quickly. If I find a song using this method, it is usually no problem at all to make it fit with the slides, even when the duration of the song is much different than the duration of the slide show. (I’ve become quite adept at using 2 or more audio tracks on the PRE7 Timeline to play the same short song selection over and over in such a way as to make it sound like one long and continuous song.)

[Shrimpfarmer]

Hey thanks George, I am glad you like the program. I could not be without it now and it often provides inspiration to me during projects. I dont bother to pre-think my music anymore and like you I tend to get all my editing done before I introduce music. That little green man just keeps shouting out the tunes until one fits.

Just to show how lazy I can be at times.... once I have the track found I click on show file location. I have the free mediainfo app on my PC so I right click the file name and copy the file location from the filename in mediainfo. Go back to my PE7 project, get media - select PC and just paste that into the file location box. PE7 then imports it without me having to track the file down.


PS

Remember that in the program settings you can tell it how similar or dissimilar you want the mix to be. You can lock it to the same genre also if you like. I often change these settings just to widen the catch.

[Steve Grisetti]

The latest version of iTunes, by the way, includes a feature called "The Genius", which helps you locate similar music.

If you select a song and activate the Genius, it will gather a playlist of similarly styled music. It's pretty cool really. Not flawless, but cool.

[RJ Johnston]

I've been using MAGIX Mufin Musicfinder. I picked it up when it was on sale. I doubt that it has as many features as the product you have.

[George Tyndall]

The latest version of iTunes, by the way, includes a feature called "The Genius", which helps you locate similar music.

If you select a song and activate the Genius, it will gather a playlist of similarly styled music. It's pretty cool really. Not flawless, but cool.

Steve, I stopped updating iTunes at Version 6 for the following reason: Later versions took away the ability to convert MP3s into WAV format, which is what I need for my slide shows.

BTW, I've been told that converting an MP3 to get a song in WAV format will not result in the same quality as an original WAV song, however, there is no doubt in mind that the converted WAV does sound better/fuller than the MP3--albeit at a cost of a lot of HDD space.

When you have time, can you confirm for me that your version of iTunes will not convert from MP3 to WAV? Right-click on the MP3 in iTunes and see if the drop down offers the choice of converting to WAV. In my experience, the newer versions of iTunes offer only the option of converting to AAC.

Thank you!

[Steve Grisetti]

As far as I can tell, you can only convert to MP3s with iTunes, George.

Though, as I've said before, I rarely use iTunes anymore for music I'm purchasing to use in a video. Amazon.com offers songs for the same price (sometimes less) and with none of the intrusive Digital Rights Management issues. You can load a song purchased from Amazon as is into a video project!

[George Tyndall]

As far as I can tell, you can only convert to MP3s with iTunes, George.

Though, as I've said before, I rarely use iTunes anymore for music I'm purchasing to use in a video. Amazon.com offers songs for the same price (sometimes less) and with none of the intrusive Digital Rights Management issues. You can load a song purchased from Amazon as is into a video project!

Steve, I’m also using Amazon to download most of my music, however, I still use the old version of iTunes to manage may music, for the reason I stated. (The Amazon downloader offers the Preference of downloading to iTunes.)

If iTunes offers something that Amazon does not, then I use the Burn to CD/Rip from CD workaround to produce a WAV file from the protected MP4 (which to the best of my knowledge is still perfectly legal).