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If you want to have a piece of original music tailored to your video production and its unique pacing, the best option has always been to hire a composer to score your video. That choice is often prohibitively expensive, however, so many video professionals instead purchase individual music selections, called needle drops, from a music library. Music libraries provide music that easily fits the budget, but unless you dedicate a lot of time to searching for just the right cut or spend a lot of time tailoring the music that's easily available to your project, you won't end up with a soundtrack that's as unique as you'd like.
The popularity of loop-based music creation software such as Apple GarageBand and Sony Acid has steered many producers toward an in-house approach to scoring their video projects. These apps make it easy to string together a series of loops into a rather repetitive underscore; unless you are musically adept, though, it's difficult to break out of this monotony and create a composition with a real melodic structure.
SmartSound is similar to other stock music companies in that it offers a collection of royalty-free recordings that can be used on an unlimited basis for multimedia, Web, TV and film productions. Unlike its competitors, however, SmartSound offers music selections as well as a companion software application, Sonicfire Pro.
SmartSound music is divided into music blocks. Any recorded music selected by SmartSound for its library is encoded with dozens of precise edit points, called Smart Blocks, using SmartSound's proprietary "Block Aid" technology. SmartSound's in-house music editors determine which blocks flow smoothly in and out of other blocks and select appropriate beginning and ending segments. When you choose a SmartSound music track and bring it into the Sonicfire Pro application, the software automatically draws on the available blocks and, using the embedded information, reconstructs a complete piece of music tailored to fit the designated length. This technology has been bundled with various edit software packages, including Avid Liquid and Adobe Premiere Pro, under the Quicktracks name.
Mood Mapping
Sonicfire Pro 4, introduced in April of this year, debuts a technology called Mood Mapping. Like previous versions, Sonicfire Pro 4 retains the ability to use embedded block metadata to customize music, but...