SoundSnap Pro for Education: Not Free, But Close!

Anyone who works with multimedia projects knows what a headache the soundtrack can be. Students want to use their favorite top-of-the-charts song, and even when you convince them not to, it's difficult quality to find loops they can use.

I've posted before about Jamendo and FreePlay Music, my favorite because it allows students to choose music by mood.

But I ran across Soundsnap the other day,and I'm going to use it for my film class and other media projects that come up next semester.


While it's not free, the site offers reasonable educator pricing--6 months for $89, though you can purchase shorter time frames,too. Better yet, the site offers professional level music and sound effects, which obviously makes for better projects.

The clips are organized by category and are keyword searchable. Unfortunately, adding in mood terms didn't work all that well. A search for "jazz happy" yielded two results, though "orchestra suspense" had 28 hits, which isn't bad.

Most files can be downloaded as mp3's and many as either wav or AIFF files, too.

If you do a lot of work with media projects, it's definitely worth looking into.

Once we've done our first few projects with it, I'll report back on how it's going.