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Free CC Chiptune Tracks (and questions about free music libraries)

A topic by Neil created Aug 19, 2016 Views: 1,009 Replies: 2

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Hi everyone, first time on posting on itch.io! I'm not sure if this is the best forum for this, so please let me know if this is annoying ha :P

So recently I had a developer acquaintance suggest that I do some royalty-free music as a way to spark some collaboration with devs (and simply contribute to the community cuz gamez r gr8). I'm a composer with a master's degree (who cares, right?) and a few game projects under my belt (much more important), so initially I dismissed the idea, thinking I should be paid for my work. However, my stance is shifting, so I thought I'd dip my toe in the pool by releasing the tracks I wrote for a little 'get-to-know Unity' game project that I did myself.

Here is a link to the .zip file on Google Drive: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-kaFT89s5eJMHgtaVdxcy1kQ00/view?usp=sharing

If this library is useful for you, and some sound effects to match would also be useful, reach out to me and I'll upload those too (as CC0).

Here is a link to listen on SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/neil-quillen/sets/music-from-the-extraordinary

Here's a link to the game project in case anyone is interested: http://www.neilquillen.com/blog/2016/4/2/presenting-the-extraordinary-bit-man-i-made-a-game

And, of course, this is where you can find out more about me and hear more of my music: www.neilquillen.com

The license these are under is the CC Attribution.

Now here are the questions I have:

Is this little library useful for anyone? If yes, why? If not, why not?
What makes a free library useful for a game designer? Variety? Consistency?
What's the most efficient/useful platform to share a library such as this?
Which licenses are fine, and which ones render a library unusable/unattractive?
Have you/would you go on to ask a composer of a royalty-free library for an original score?

Thanks so much in advance, and I hope these tracks can be useful to some of you!

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No Time To PlayModerator7 years ago (1 edit) (+1)

Hi Neil! Welcome. Speaking as a dev whose games would be mute without the generosity of composers like you, I say more music under free licenses is always welcome. So thanks for sharing! To answer your questions,

Of course your library can be useful! I actually heard some music in your Soundcloud I could have used in an older game. But I closed the tab, and now can't find it again. Never mind -- point is, you never know when someone out there might need what you make.
Speaking from my experience as a game dev, and from what people say on Open Game Art, it's a lot more useful to have a music album (or any asset pack) that's thematically consistent than a bunch of mismatched pieces. Even mixing and matching gets easier -- and one always has to mix and match when reusing assets.
My go-to place for reusable game assets is the aforementioned OGA, but the asset section right here on itch.io is quickly catching up. The one time I had to scour Jamendo for a soundtrack, it took me days (ugh). Long story short, you're already here, why not take advantage of it.
Licensing is a thorny issue. Most important factor is that any license that prohibits commercial reuse makes your music off-limits, even for a freeware game. And people who want to make games for the Apple Store or Steam will have to avoid Creative Commons because of the anti-DRM clause in that family of licenses. (Unless it's CC0, of course.) But I apply them to my work precisely because I'm anti-DRM. At the other end of the spectrum, some creators favor the General Public License, but it's officially not recommended for anything but source code, and it's also one of the hardest to comply with. Yet people still use it. But the most popular these days are liberal open source licenses like MIT or BSD.
As for your last question, if I could afford to commission a composer, I'd go straight to my friends instead of digging through free archives...

Hope this helps.

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Neil7 years ago

This is incredibly helpful, thanks! I just created an account on OGA - going to upload this little library there. Someone else also mentioned it on Reddit ha.

If you find something on my SoundCloud that's useful, chances are it's an old demo and I'll happily convert it to a CC license, so let me know! You can tell me what game it would have fit and I'll try and guess ha :P

Thanks again for your response. I'm feeling very confident that this is a worthwhile endeavor, and will probably end up making a nice beefy library of free music. On that topic, what genre would be more useful for indie devs that are looking for library music? What genre would you like to see a library of?

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