Uncarved Block’s Calm Space album page.Great for meditation and deep therapy work, Calm Space works through four pieces of music that change in mood from mystical with warm deep notes to slightly industrial and drone.

Available for personal listening and for single therapy practices, and also available for business projects under our Royalty Free Production Music License.

Check out more of Uncarved Block’s catalogue at the Uncarved Block Artist Page.

Always ensure the license you purchase legally allows you to use this music for your purpose.

The piece is designed specifically to connect with the unconscious and so nothing it put in the way of doing that. The tones help you move into a subconscious state and allow you to focus on relaxing images of glowing red suns with birds flying overhead.

Available today at Ambient Music Garden, under Jash’s artist page for all independent therapists or, using the royalty free license, available for therapy centres and other business projects.

So enough of the trumpet blowing. Lets get on with the review. The collection is called Mystic Meditation and and is a part of RoyaltyFreeMusic.com’s collection of royalty free hypnosis music.

This collection is called Mystic Meditation and is a part of RoyaltyFreeMusic.com’s collection of royalty free hypnosis music

The collection starts off with Bisque Pimp, a warm and awakening ambient track with minimal melodic ingredient making it useful for therapies of the subconscious and meditation.

Drone Boy isn’t as you may think, a meditative drone ambient track. Instead there are gentle watery sounds flowing over acoustic plucks and ambient, reflective piano chords. Background nature sounds warm the soul and emphasise the feeling of safety and calmness within the piece.

Seeing the title, Greasy Drama and the Def Quiver made me wonder what to expect. Early in the listener is greeted with gentle whistles and spiralling sounds. A subtle tone lays a melody for those that want to listen hard, but if not, you can lay back and imagine yourself in the clouds.

Liquid Eye Full presents a gentle plucked melody from the east with whistle accompaniment and an ambience of a monastery high in misty mountains.

Meditate Grandpa returns us to ambient piano but with more ambient background sounds and light percussion giving a sense of space and warm afternoon sun.

My personal favourite track name from this collection, Millipede of the Mystic Bottle Full gives us tinkling sounds of thousands of little feet whilst a piano & electric piano provide ambient wanderings with the backing of padded synth lines and warm tones.

Pancake Brain offers us some sudden rushes and cymbals to warn us of perhaps a more mysterious ride that we have heard so far. With door like squeaks and low drone we are perhaps in a more natural urban ambient environment.

Peace Egplant tells us we are moving east again and are drawn in with a breathy subtle melody whilst chimes are blown by the wind in the background with the occasional flute note to add more the flavour of the east once again.

Serene Ferret opens with a digeridoo and sudden flute sounds offering up the ambience of open spaces. This piece will not warm but will chill you, like a dark rain cloud overhead.

This Old Legion opens dark with deep notes clashing whilst brighter sounds try to get through like a cloudy day with a little peek of blue sky. As things clear the piece develops into a windy day perhaps moving towards a rain storm.

If you have a collection of downtempo or ambient pieces of music you would like reviewing, please give us a shout.

Guy
Ambient Music Garden

Well, its not true. If you exclusively choose to purchase music from royalty free organisations such as Ambient Music Garden, you don’t have to purchase a license from a performance rights association because you are not using the royalty free music illegally by playing it in your store. That is what it was designed for and what you purchased the right to do via your royalty free partner.

Choosing royalty free music means that you can choose from a range of businesses online and mix your play list to suit your needs. But whatever you do, don’t mix this music with music from CDs you picked up off Amazon or from your local music store, if you still have one. You will not automatically have the right to play this music in your store, unlike the royalty free music. Mixing them will mean you will have to pay for a performance royalty license so that the artists and copyright owners of the music on the CD get paid for that type of use of their music.

If you have any questions about this please get in touch and we can chat.

Jons has created a chilled, relaxing collection of pieces for a whole album that can be purchases as an album or separately as individual tracks for royalty free uses.

Timescapes is a traditional relaxation style of album that will work with many therapy environments as backgrounds to massage and other relaxation style therapies.

Timescapes is quite engaging with feel good melodies and so will keep you engaged whilst you listen so is great for keeping you aware of your environment and lifting your spirits.

More from Phillip Jons soon.

Check Timescapes out at the Phillip Jons’ artist page here.

I read somewhere recently a guy just stuffed midi tracks into a DAW and put up instruments and just listened to the results. That’s how he got his inspiration going. I worked on something this morning and found by accident a really nice twist to something.. So it seems to me that it can be fun to just experiment sometimes :O)

I too have felt this when composing. Once I dragged a drum midi file and put it on a lead instrument by mistake and found that the result, albeit quirky, was fun and inspirational.

Composing can be hard to keep up as a professional writer, constantly looking for fresh and new creations. Sometimes the accidents can take you down a road that you never would have thought of consciously to do new things that are not your usual mode of composition and so are exactly that which you are looking for, fresh and new creations.

Musicians rarely create something and give it free for anyone to use in any way whatsoever. They may give away music as part of a wider promotional plan to create earnings from sales these free versions attract, of from earnings for giving permission to use their music in specific ways, which is called licensing. Check out Creative Commons for more details on the most popular way that artists offer up their music. For example, they may offer their music free to listen to only in non commercial situations. But if you want to use their music for a business use then they will want payment for the use of their work.

Musicians are not hard to understand, they just want payment for their hard work. They are passionate people who love what they do. Consider (for example) a bricklayer. He would want, and need payment for his work so he can pay his bills and earn a living. Unless he is doing it for charity or as a hobby.

Royalty free music is music that is offered for sale whilst the artist retains the ownership of his or her music. Royalty free music offers the music to customers with terms that will not need additional payments for usage after purchasing the music in the first place.

Royalty Free music will be sold and therefore licensed for specific uses. For example an artist may only offer you the right to use their music within dvd productions or presentation backgrounds and not for TV broadcasting. The use of their music in certain conditions will also require different fees depending on use. For example to use a piece of work in a major international film will probably be more expensive than using music for wedding background music understandably. Expect the amount of effort and quality of the music production will also be relative, i.e. a musician will probably work on a range of remixes and edits for a film production whilst a piece of music for backgrounds in presentations will be as is.

So, back to copyright.

If you wanted copyright free music you are effectively asking for ownership of a piece of music. Now that’s expensive. Say an artist has taken a week to create a piece of music. He / she is skilled and earns well at their art and so they don’t come that cheap either. How much do you think a piece of music would cost to own? Well some people do actually want to have the exclusive right to a piece of music. Take for example a signature tune. You will probably going to play this a lot. Take for example the Intel signature tune, all 2 seconds of it. Just to own that piece of music outright would have costs tens of thousands of dollars. Had they licensed it, Im sure it would have over time cost a lot more.

But if you just want a piece of music for a specific project, for a given number of production units, within certain boundaries (i.e. time and countries for instance) you wont need it for all the other reasons you would have access to if you owned the copyright. So, its going to be dramatically cheaper to just purchase the right to use the music in this way only, and for no other use. Take that tens of thousands of dollars and knock off approximately three of those zeros and that is the difference.

So, forget looking for copyright free music, cut to the chaise and check out royalty free music for your project today. Go somewhere that has a good collection of the specific genre you are looking for and listen to a good range of pieces from different artists. Develop a dialogue with the music library and ask them as many questions as you need before feeling happy that you will get exactly what you want.

Here at Ambient Music Garden we are ready for you if you are looking for royalty free ambient and downtempo music. We don’t do much else but pride ourselves in the music that we do offer. Please take a look when you have time.

Click here to check out our ambient relaxation, chillout and downtempo music.

Take for example a guided visualisation (or visualization if you are in the US). A therapist or vocalist can create a script to read over a piece of music but for sure there will be long gaps where the music itself is playing.

At Ambient Music Garden, licensing a piece of music for background for voice over audio is covered under our Royalty Free Production Music license.

Each piece of music has a 5000 units of distribution maximum before requiring an additional fee. This is not a total across a range of pieces of music but for every and each piece of music purchased by a customer.

Our 5 minute tracks start at around US$35 each for the mp3 version so the cost is very low when you consider the overall revenue that can be gained from a 5000 unit distribution agreement. For example, US$5,000 can be made from selling these at $1 each so that means the cost of the music is only  0.7% of the total revenue earned. Considering the recording will probably sell for a lot more than a dollar, and considering maybe that a collection of pieces may be sold via the Internet and not have the traditional costs of CD jewell cases and CD production and artwork printing, the profit on a product such as this is remarkably high.

As a therapy recording artist you can conceivably make make tens of thousands of dollars on a production whilst the musician may only make a few hundred dollars from supplying their work to you.

Getting quality music for professional products could not be cheaper and more compelling than this.

For me, an artist is someone who is able to keep out the complexities of life and still find space in their mind to notice the wonders of the world.

To have free thought and not be restricted by much that their culture dictates.

To be able to see in things others overlook.

What is particularly interesting is that this article was written nine years ago.

So why isn’t ambient relaxation music used more in our health care organisations and within our workplaces?

Although saying that he hasn’t been hidden in the shadows. With his success as an international producer he has made himself more famous than his (slightly) more humble other achievements as the keyboard player for Roxy Music and, of course, the leading light of modern ambient music. I say ‘modern’ because ambience as a theme was explored many years before with the likes of (for example) Debussy.

Brian’s early solo work created the first modern ambient albums and his thinking around the use of ambient music as background and unobtrusive has been captured in interviews since then.

However, in my opinion a particular collaboration with David Byrne which resulted in My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts has also given ambient, and electronic music huge inspiration during the past 25 plus years.

My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts provided inspirational rhythms and melodies, new fresh approaches to composition as well as using audio recordings from various sources, almost as samples before samples were invented as digital clips to be processed. In the days this album was created they would have engineered the album with tape.

‘Bush’ remains one of my own personal favourite albums of all time as well as my favourite Eno album over and above my own acknowledgement of the importance and significance of Eno’s ambient collections.
]]> http://ambientmusicgarden.com/blog/musician-talk/creator-of-modern-ambient-music-brian-eno-is-60-this-week.html/feed http://ambientmusicgarden.com/blog/royalty-free-production-music-library/music-for-dvd-video-productions.html http://ambientmusicgarden.com/blog/royalty-free-production-music-library/music-for-dvd-video-productions.html#comments Wed, 07 May 2008 13:14:56 +0000 BlogAdmin http://ambientmusicgarden.com/blog/?p=46 Music for DVD Video Productions

Music for DVD video productions requires a range of needs depending on the complexity of the production itself. Here at Ambient Music Garden we offer instant download of mp3s for all of our music catalogue. However, upon request many of our music pieces are available in other formats as well.

At the time of writing we are not offering stems for tracks although through our commissioning process (please use our Contact Us page) we will be able to consider and process where the artists chosen is available to complete this sort of work.

Ambient and Relaxation music is perfect for DVD productions because it is emotionally connecting music. Of course any need to have a ‘party’ or upbeat style of presentation in a video will not work with ambient music however for many other uses, Ambient is the better choice to present mood, be that dark or light, be that natural or fantasy. Ambient is great for documentaries, and information DVDs for corporates about new business ventures and new concepts that have to be communicated across an organisation. DVD video productions for corporates can be the most effective way to communicate a message. Seeing a CEO explain the proposition to the organisation can get the message across clearly. Mixing video with subsequent questions and answers with statistics presented via a PowerPoint slide presentation enables much of the ambiguity of a project to become clear.

Using music as a theme tune to a project will evoke a positive emotion towards the project, much like a theme tune. Using the same music within the video and having it in the background of a Powerpoint presentation continues the theme, and creates continuity in the process

Here at Ambient Music Garden we are aware of this need and provide a catelogue of ambient music to meet the different moods and feelings required to support a project. We cateogorise our music in a number of ways to meet the needs of different customers but our royalty free category is not the only way to get royalty free music. Almost all our music is available for business use under the Royalty-Free Production Music License.

Click here to view Ambient Music Garden’s Royalty-Free category. But don’t forget all categories hold royalty-free music, the royalty free category only presents the most popular chosen pieces for business use.

Creating Ambience is only partly achieved by creating the physical environment of a resturant. Music is required to create that background ambience that is not intrusive yet provides mood and feeling for the resturant.

Engaging music on the other hand will detract from the connection people will have with each other at a restaurant. So it is a challenge to get this right for many today. Traditional music is also not the first choice for many country cuisine restaurant owners. Some now are choosing a style of music that is more in keeping with the tastes of their customers rather than choosing traditional music that does not always appeal the their customer base.

Here at Ambient Music Garden we offer a wide range of ambient relaxation music that is downloadable instantly and can be used via a mp3 player or burnt onto a CD. Using our Royalty-Free Production Music License we allow restaurants to use our music within their premises without additional performance fees that resturant owners will incur over time.

Click here to view Ambient Music Garden’s Royalty-Free category. But don’t forget all categories hold royalty-free music, the royalty free category only presents the most popular chosen pieces for business use.

I have had a number of customers enquire about using Ambient Music Garden music as a free gift packaged with their own product. The product itself may not be directly connected to the music, as in, its not a DVD production that needs music in the background. What is being proposed is that the piece of music is packaged within a product as an extra incentive for purchasing the product. For instance, a piece of relaxation music packaged with an ebook that focuses on stress. Or, a piece of meditation music packaged with an online course on how to meditate.

Ambient Music Garden has a license that enables this and is called the Royalty Free Production Library Music License. This means a product owner has the permission from the music artist to use their music for redistribution as part of another product. Cds that you buy from shops and mp3s you download from iTunes do not come with that agreement. This does not mean that product owners are allowed to sell your music as a CD compilation or sell the piece of music as their own. It is strictly as part of a package with another product that has a link to the other product in a way that is in the same context.

Ambient Music Garden has a range of categories of ambient relaxation music, all of mp3s for instant download from our store.

Click here to view Ambient Music Garden’s Royalty-Free category. But don’t forget all categories hold royalty-free music, the royalty free category only presents the most popular chosen pieces for business use.

I get regular requests from therapists to enable Ambient Music Garden’s music to be used as background music for audio meditation recordings. Sometimes these therapists want to burn these recordings to Cds and sell these to their customers.

Musicians are often abused by others who will take a piece of music and use it without permission and effectively steal the music and not allow the musician to get paid for their work. Because of the ability to easily copy music from Cds and other places musicians find it hard to make a living and take a risk with their work, each piece can take weeks if not months to complete.

That’s why at Ambient Music Garden we have devised the Royalty Free Product Music Library License. This means that therapists who want to sell their own guided meditations and affirmation creations can do so with quality background music. As long as the CD does not present the music on its own as an instrumental, and has a vocal recorded across the music as the meditation guide, or affirmations, this license will legally work.

Its not easy to get permission to have the legal right to use someone else’s music within your own CD production as it could be seen as reproduction and redistribution at a financial loss of the original artist. At Ambient Music Garden we offer out music under this license for this purpose only and you are assured that through the journeys your CDs take there is no risk to you that your product will be sitting somewhere waiting to bite your butt one day.

Click here to view Ambient Music Garden’s Royalty-Free category. But don’t forget all categories hold royalty-free music, the royalty free category only presents the most popular chosen pieces for business use.

I recently enjoyed a show where a number of different dance groups presented themes for dancing. Each theme represented a feeling or a natural body of some sort. So for example we had happiness as a feeling, and the planets as natural bodies.

I was struck by the affect that the music had on the whole presentation. The quality of the PA system and the way that the music was mixed in and out and how the dancers synchronised their dancing to match the passion of the music as it flowed.

I also noticed how with some shows it was hard to be drawn into the dance and to understand how it connected to the theme. For example the planets dance I found suffered because the music didn’t have anything that would connect our emotions and give a good feel for planets in motion and circling our sun.

This then made the dance ambiguous to my eyes, I would have thought I would see arcs & rotating shapes within the choreography.

I thought to myself, something ‘spacey’ would do well. If dance companies had a collection of music online that they could just press a button and listen to music from different genres to find something that sounded like it was representing heavenly bodies in motion within our solar system, not quite ‘Star Wars’ theme, but more ambient and longer in length enabling a dance piece to run without needing to have audio edits because the tracks were too short.

Well, that’s exactly what we have here at Ambient Music Garden. You can browse the categories and click to listen to each of the pieces of music ranging from ambient and relaxation, through more meditative music to chillout and downtempo mp3s. All for instant download.

The license we have designed to meet the needs of live shows like this is called the Royalty Free Production Library Music License which means that you have the agreement of the music artist to use their music in a public place and play it to an audience there. Cds that you buy from shops and mp3s you download from iTunes do not come with that agreement.

Click here to view Ambient Music Garden’s Royalty-Free category. But don’t forget all categories hold royalty-free music, the royalty free category only presents the most popular chosen pieces for business use.

Music, particularly ambient music, provides an opportunity to create emotionally engaging drama when connected with the acting of a play.

Ambient music can evoke emotions from sadness and fear to happiness and relaxation. Using Ambient Music Garden’s range of categories drama clubs can browse, listen to and choose to download from a range of different artists and styles.

Using our Royalty-Free Production Music Licence, drama clubs and theatres will be licensed to use this music in public performances as well as interludes.

Click here to view Ambient Music Garden’s Royalty-Free category. But don’t forget all categories hold royalty-free music, the royalty free category only presents the most popular chosen pieces for business use.

Music for web sites and also for Flash projects within web sites is a different challenge from the graphical artistic lead design of most web sites.

As new media hits web sites nowadays it is still critical for web designers to create consistency and continue to attract the attention of the visitor. Breaks and interruptions to video feeds are common but yet risk loosing visitors to other sites and attractions at the blink of an eye.

Using compressed mp3 formats does have its challenges with quality but this is a balance with the need to offer a continuously playing piece of music to all the target customer’s bandwidth profiles.

Flash provides a great way to embed mp3s and stream or download them right from the browser. Many websites look to applications outside the browser to play a piece of complimentary music however in this way the site owner looses contact with the customer and hands over the web site’s experience to an additional application. With Flash you are able to keep the continuity.

With Ambient Music Garden music many are of a long enough length that shorter pieces with varying versions of the same piece of music can be presented to the customer depending on where they are within the website’s ‘funnel’.

Additionally, using Ambient Music Garden’s commissioning process (use the Contact Us form on the home page), website owners can have a piece of music created specifically for their website. Added to this, requesting specialist audio engineering skills that Ambient Music Garden has, specially compressed audio that enables a much lower file size for the respective length of track can be achieved via Flash. Flash can be used as a multi-track player that will enable up to eight tracks of audio to play.

Therefore there is a choice of each track to be compressed differently according to what can realistically be achieved. Additionally, repetitive pieces of audio can be looped whilst other pieces of music introduced and faded out. The end result is that the listener will hear a long piece of music at a higher quality than can be achieved through simple streaming of an mp3. This reduces costs as bandwidth requirements are reduced too.

Click here to view Ambient Music Garden’s Royalty-Free category. But don’t forget all categories hold royalty-free music, the royalty free category only presents the most popular chosen pieces for business use.

Using Royalty Free Production Library Music Within Your Business Project

Royalty Free Production Library Music is a great and cost effective way to create a professional finish to many business projects from digital media to bricks and mortar.

New retail outlets that want to present a calm and relaxed environment can quickly gain that atmosphere with a piece of relaxation music or a collection collated and downloaded as mp3s to then play within their store.

Not only stores but professional services waiting rooms, galleries and restaurants all benefit from the atmosphere and mood settling that relaxation mp3 downloads create.

As they are royalty free, they are not chargeable once the initial purchase price for the use associated with the licence has been made.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royalty_free

The price, different to simple listening at home, reflects the business use and that the piece of music will be publicly heard by many within a building over time, and also within digital projects over time as well.

Digital projects require ambience as well. Since digital design companies are able to create stunning graphical and video productions for clients there is a powerful need to compliment this visuals with music that matches the feel of the video.

By using a royalty free piece from Ambient Music Garden you will be able to request different formats for use in your editing stage to meet the quality needs of the client.

Music on hold and websites require a higher compressed file for different reasons. Although many telephone networks are now digital, they are still analogue for the last part of the journey to the customer’s office or home. This means that the quality of audio is still at a compromised level compared to all digital networks using fibre optic.

Prices at Ambient Music Garden for purchasing music for business use are dependent on the length of the track. The longer tracks can often give more variations to a track to then use in slightly different ways across a production. Additionally, the length of a piece will mean that it will be able to cover longer productions from end to end without any sound editing required.

Pricing for royalty-free production library music usually starts at around $40 per piece. This is reflects the value that a piece of music will have on a business project.

An artist that is willing to have their work associated with business ventures can use this market to create a career in creating music for business use in an industry where creating a career is nowadays somewhat challenges by the changing purchasing behaviour of consumers and the in ability of record labels to keep up and monetise new market opportunities.

Click here to go to Ambient Music Garden’s most popular royalty free music mp3 download category. But you can also browse all music at Ambient Music Garden and choose the Royalty Free Porduction Library License to use our music in your business project.

“We’ve had some interesting success so far even though we have not publicised our commercial licensing business”, said Guy Lewis, founder of Ambient Music Garden. “Businesses are finding our music catalogue perfect for online browsing and downloading for their own business projects. We have businesses using music for PowerPoint presentation background music, Flash embedded music projects, web sites, background music for retail outlets and also for DVD & CD projects. There are many other uses for music and Ambient Music Garden has geared up for them with the new category.”

“However you don’t have to choose music within the Royalty-free category only, that only presents our most popular music for commercial use. Check out all the categories of Ambient Music Garden as almost all our music is available for commercial licensing as well.”

Click Here To Go To Ambient Music Garden’s Royalty Free Production Music Top Page Here. Don’t forget to check all the other categories for royalty free music for business use. Just change the license option at the bottom of the page to purchase the music for business use.

Ambient Music Garden:
Using our Royalty-Free Production Music License you can use our music as background music in powerpoint presentations, in retail, galleries and restaurants, on-hold music, Flash & website music, music for commercials, music for video games, film music, and music for video / dvd production.

Why Flash Is Infinitely Better At Delivering Music Across The Web Than MP3.

Introduction

“…it is Flash that arranges the audio and adds functionality that enables the music file to go further than an Mp3 can ever do”

Flash has been around now for quite a while. And whilst innovative Flash artists have primarily focused on designing and engineering some jaw dropping animated creations Flash has for many, slipped into first place as the technology of choice for delivering audio alongside web site content.

Why is this? Why doesn’t everyone know about Flash’s ability to create a better user experience? Well, within this document I explain why it really is better and why your next website refresh should include Flash embedded music at minimal overhead to your customers.

Flash Background
I won’t go into the history of Flash here (you might well loose interest) so lets just say it had humble beginnings yet was seen by a few far seeing individuals who took it to the next stage from where it captured the imaginations of zillions of web developers, web artists & animators.

I can remember in 1999 being excited by MP3000 produced by CleverMedia which is an online tool for creating your own mix of a range of beats, melodies and sound effects. It is still a fun interactive music tool that holds its weight many years after it was first created. This shows clearly that given good design Flash has an astonishing ability to last even while technology continues to change around it. Dont forget, this little app is nearly 10 years old and still is pretty cool.

As Flash developed over the years there were a number of technical improvements that enabled even better delivery of sound along side the animated creations. Once such advance was Flash’s ability to deliver more control of audio and multi-track playback.

So Why Is Flash Better than MP3s?

Whilst many gain competitive edge by adding music with Flash technology to their sites, those outside the Flash community with little awareness continue to use mp3s. So why is Flash as a proprietary technology standard still so compelling?

Well for a start, perhaps I should clarify one thing. This argument focuses on why you should deliver your music using Flash that has compressed (for example) a WAV file into mp3 and delivered via a Flash file. The Flash file would have the suffix ‘.swf’. So Mp3 technology is still in there compressing the audio yet it is Flash that arranges the audio and adds functionality that enables the music file to go further than an Mp3 can ever do.

The following is a list of the key benefits for you the website owner.

Quicker Than The Equivalent mp3 at being downloaded:
This is where Flash saves the day. Imagine having three instruments that were the equivalent size of three loops. Instead of playing three loops one after the other, with Flash a professional Flash developer & composer will be able to construct a piece of music that mixes these three different parts of the same music and multiply the variants of the same tune to as many as twice that amount. So instead of getting three 10 second loops you will have a total of a whole minute of music for the same time it takes to download 30 seconds of mp3 based loops.

So, with that in mind you can consider using an intro that allows your customers to view your welcome page for 30 seconds. Then you might feel you would like to draw them further in to view product pages for example. So, you could consider turning off the repetitive loop, implying to the customer that they have seen all that there is to see and its it time to move on. Once in the product area you may want to consider using a full one minute (for example) music track that loops gently in the background with a quieter volume.

Customisation
You can create a control interface specifically tuned to your customer’s tastes as part of the object that has the audio embedded or linked to it. You don’t need to be restricted to the audio players on the market such as RealPlayer ®, Windows Media Player ®, Winamp ® or QuickTime ®. What if you choose to deliver your audio via one of the player specific formats and many of your customers don’t have the ability to play them? Simply create your own player in Flash knowing that 97% of the world’s connected browser users can then view and listen to your audio. In terms of design and appearance, literally, if you can imagine it, you can create it and it will work in all the known browsers to the modern world (and perhaps some others on other planets too). There are many Flash Players for sale if you wish to purchase one instead. There are lots of fun designs out there to meet all needs.

Interaction
As mentioned above, you can even get your customers to choose the mix of the audio file they are listening to, lift the base, lower the snare for example, remove a loop or make a choice over a number of loops. Give your customers this sort of control and they will be back for more and more.

Control
You can create a flash player to control your music; you can create controls for pan, volume, play, rewind, stop and forward. You can create a list of audio files to play; you can even create animations and buttons that trigger the audio files if you want to create an interactive experience between music and animation for your customers.

Efficiency
Flash compresses the audio files and provides options for streaming and downloading that provide the designer with choices that match the needs of the content and end user. Additionally, because with all Flash content, once it is downloaded it can be replayed again and again, designers and engineers are creating cleaver long play musical and audio pieces that are a fraction of the original WAV, AIFF or MP3 (or other!) file size. These Flash designers compress files according to the dynamics of the audio and create highly accurately synced loops that work with each other to create layers of music much like how each musical track would be arranged within a modern computerised Digital Audio Workstation.

Ubiquity
Even thought Flash is owned by Adobe and is not open source 97% of all browsers connected to the Internet have the Flash Player plug-in installed. The player comes as standard within many browsers and is quick and easy to upgrade to the latest version of Flash. So, whilst still proprietary as a standard (it isnt an ‘open standard’ in the same way as mpeg is for example) it hits all of the user base of Internet connected surfers that you will want to turn into customers. The 3% that don’t use Flash aren’t interested in seeing graphics or listening to music.

Compelling
Flash provides many digital designers and artists with an incredible creative tool that they use to blow the minds of web users. They have been achieving this for many years and will continue to do so for many years to come.

Summary And The Future
What does Adobe need to do now to develop Flash’s audio capabilities? Whilst the features of today make Flash compelling for audio delivery many of the Flash audio community are frustrated by the lack of audio features within Flash. Here are a number of features that would greatly enhance Flash’s ability to deliver audio more successfully:

1) Make mp3’s loop seamlessly. Currently if you add an MP3 into Flash and publish it, Flash will create a small gap before replaying the mp3 file thus destroying any loop’s effect. The only way around this today is to avoid importing mp3s, import WAVs (for example) and have them compressed down to mp3 format for publishing. Bizarre but true.
Adobe get features like that into Flash when Flash needs this functionality to achieve perfectly synchronised loops.

3) Audio Plug-Ins: Link with the music community so that Flash is opened up to the plug ins available to add more richness to those who do not have access to more complex Digital Audio Workstations such as Bias Peak and other Adobe products.

4) Make synchronising easier: some developers find some sound files (mp3 or WAV format) go out of sync over time when there is no reason. This feels like a bug.

5) Making Movie Clips within movies playable within the stage whilst being developed would avoid developers having to work blind on a lot of audio / visual synchronising. There are some Flash components for sale that achieve this but are not part of Flash as standard.

Copyright Kesseny ltd 2008 All Rights Reserved except for:
Flash® (a registered trademark of the Adobe Corporation). &
MP3000: Copyright © 1995-2008 Clever Media. Note: Clevermedia gave permission to reference thier work when Ambient Muisc Garden was named Ambient Music Garden.com
RealPlayer ® 2008 RealNetworks, Inc. Patents Pending. All rights reserved. RealPlayer, is a registered trademark of RealNetworks, Inc
Windows Media Player Microsoft is either a registered trademark or trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries.
Winamp ® is a registered trademark of Nullsoft Inc.
QuickTime is a trademark of Apple Computer, Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries.

Ambient Music Garden & Flash Soundtracks are trademarks of Kesseny ltd

www.Ambient Music Garden.com

First Things First: Royalty Free Use

Ambient Music Garden music is royalty free so you are able to play the music as part of your professional therapy sessions and group meetings. It also means you are able to play the music in shops and galleries if you are connected to one as part of your therapy environment. Normal CD music requires you to pay the royalty collection agency of your country a fee that can be the cost of 10 to 15 Cds per year for this privilege.

Playing Ambient Music Garden music via your computer

If you have a low noise computer such as a laptop you can simply  play the music via your computer using your chosen music player such as Real, iTunes or Windows Media Player. We would recommend in this case using some reasonable external speakers that plug into your headphone socket. There is usually a choice for sale at computer stores. The better ones will power themselves and so give off a better sound. The better the speakers the more effective the music will be to your client. Normally computer speakers are weak at playing the lower sounds in a song so please bear this in mind.

Alternatively some more modern Hi-fi’s will have an input socket that allows you to connect your computer headphone socket to your hi-fi so that you can play your music via a better amplifier and speaker combination.

The complications with this method will tend to focus on sourcing the right stereo cables and plugs along with finding (possibly) the AUX button on your player.

Playing Ambient Music Garden music using a CD

Perhaps the less complicated method is to burn a CD of the tracks you have purchased in the order you choose and use a home or portable hi-fi / CD player.

Burning software is available online or at your local computer store. Ahead Nero and Roxio Toast are two that are popular. You may already have something on your computer that burns CDs for you so check before you purchase something new.

How you burn your music onto a CD depends on what type of Cds your player can play. For instance, older CD players will not be able to listen to mp3 formatted Cds. So, when you burn your music you will need to choose another format and clearly the only format suitable for older players will be the standard CD-Audio format that is the format that Cds from the shops come in.

Finally..

Ambient Music Garden provides the above information to help you get started with integrating Ambient Music Garden music into your therapy sessions. We can not support your technical issues as these sort of queries can be varied and can we are not set up or have the time. Ambient Music Garden provides music as mp3s because it is a universally standard format that will work across the world. If you do have any queries about this information of any other questions before you start then please use the Contact Us page to send us a note.

What is Royalty Free Music?

Royalty Free Music is music offered for use without the professional user needing to pay additional costs for using the music within their own line of work, just the initial purchase price.

Don’t get the term ‘royalty free music’ mixed up with copyright. Copyright is about the ownership of a piece of music. Each artist will aim to retain the ownership of their piece of music unless they specifically sell it, or hand it over to a record label as part of their contractual agreement (although this is changing with the entry of net labels such as Ambient Music Garden.)

Music you hear on the radio costs the radio stations for each broadcast. Music you hear within a film production has to be purchased specifically for film making. Music played in the background of shops and galleries requires additional costs to cover royalties. However Ambient Music Garden music is royalty free so you can play our music within your theraputic sessions without being charged any additional costs.

Each piece of Ambient Music Garden music is licensed to an individual for their use within their own theraputic work and also for those that are self healing. A different agreement is required where the piece of music is going to be used with large audiences or for large health organisations. This agreement is included within the terms and conditions of sale.

Musicians are protected by international treaties that enable them to collect money from users of their work.

There has never been a better time to try to go it alone as opposed to sell your music via a record company. Clearly record companies do offer benefits still, however for the smaller circulation musicians the Internet offers a fantastic opportunity to get access to a global market (although I have to stress here that Ambient Music Garden does not currently market to the whole world for security reasons).

Within the western world I have all probably witnesses and even been involved in the increased acceptance and interest in alternative therapies. In addition to this, ‘alternatives’ have become ‘conventional’ & increased their popularity even more.

With broadband so available now in western countries alternative and conventional therapists looking to music to enhance their client and customer’s experiences now have a great opportunity to browse and download a better range of music to suit their needs than that which is physically available on CD in the small genre collections at the local music shop.

Additionally those of us who want to use music to assist in our own healing or simply relaxing or meditating can browse and buy so much easier online. As one artist put it recently, “…this is a type of music that is traditionally hard to obtain…i.e. sifting through endless whale song Cds and Tin gongs down ur local record shop!”

Holistic therapy seems to me to becoming a strong competitor to hairdressing for like-minded young people entering college today. Each one of these new therapists needs quality music to suit their therapy style.

Additionally, music therapy within conventional mental health trusts is coming of age with new initiatives to support a range of mental health problems. So, although Ambient Music Garden today focuses on the single therapist, and the license that is sold covers single therapists there are opportunities to sell to larger organisations.

I think this also gives a signal about what I can achieve together. Avoiding stereotypes of fluty meditative tapes with comically patronising voice-overs I have the opportunity to create a new direction for therapy music.