Due to the low budget nature of independently developed games, and the presumed lack of audio production experience of most indie developers, an ideal source for music and sound for indie games is royalty-free archives.
For this project, I have researched several sources of royalty-free audio, looking at the variety of sounds available and the restrictions of the licenses they are published under.
Freesound
Website: https://freesound.org/
Type: Sound effects
“Freesound aims to create a huge collaborative database of audio snippets, samples, recordings, bleeps, … released under Creative Commons licenses that allow their reuse”
Freesound is a website that hosts a sound effect database. Users can upload sound clips and effects for others to download and use. It is a well known resource for sounds effects, and is useful for low budget productions such as independently developed games.
Licensing
Audio published on Freesound are licensed under Creative Commons. However, the legal usability of these sounds varies depending on the license owned by the respective user. Any licensing restrictions that are applied to an audio file can be overlooked with the permission of its owner.
Zero license
A zero license means the creator has waived all of their rights of ownership over the product. A sound on Freesound with a CC0 license can be freely used and modified for any purpose, even commercial, without risk of breaking copyright law.
Attribution
An attribution license requires that proper credit is given for the use of the product. As long as the correct individual is accredited, the asset can be freely used and modified. Attribution must include the name of the sound, the user that created and uploaded, and a link to the user’s profile on Freesound.
Non-commercial attribution
Content published under the non-commercial attribution license are under the same restrictions as the attribution license, but with the additional condition that the content cannot be used in products created for profit.
Sampling+
A Sampling+ license has the same limitations as an attribution license, but the audio cannot be used for advertising purposes. This license has been retired by Creative Commons, due to the lack of usage of the license and how restrictive it is when used with other licenses. Audio used from Freesound that has the Sampling+ license will still be observed as such, though use of the license itself is discouraged by Freesound.
Proper accreditation:
This uses these sounds from freesound:
sound1 by user1 ( http://freesound.org/people/user1/)
sound2, sound3 by user2 ( http://freesound.org/people/user2/)
Incompetech
Website: https://incompetech.com/
Type: Music
Incompetech is a site containing over 2000 royalty-free music tracks. All music created on the site is licensed under the Creative Commons attribution license (as described above), meaning all of it can be edited and used for any purpose as long as the original owner is properly credited.
Proper accreditation:
“<song name>” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
BBC Sound Effects
Website: http://bbcsfx.acropolis.org.uk/
Type: Sound effects
A library of sound effects used by the BBC, recently made available to the public under the terms of the RemArc Content License. According to this license, any content from the archive is comparably under the same restrictions as a non-commercial attributions license under Creative Commons, however the content can only be used for educational purposes. As this project is for a university assignment, content from the BBC Sound Effects library can be used as long as we do not profit from doing so.
Proper accreditation:
http://bbcsfx.acropolis.org.uk/ – © copyright 2018 BBC
Sound 1
Sound 2
Sound 3
etc.
Lasso Incorporated 