LibGuides: Public Domain & Creative Commons: Audio

Music

ccMixter
"ccMixter is a community music site featuring remixes licensed under Creative Commons where you can listen to, sample, mash-up, or interact with music in whatever way you want."
Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project
"Digital collection of over 8,000 cylinder recordings... listen to thousands of musical and spoken selections from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and discover a little-known era of recorded sound." Recordings licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 License.
dig.ccMixter
"Looking for music for a video, school project, game you’re developing, podcast or just for listening in your cubicle or mobile music device? Find exactly the music you’re looking for - podsafe, liberally licensed - using dig.ccMixter Music Discovery tool."
Free Music Archive
"The Free Music Archive is an interactive library of high-quality, legal audio downloads."
FreePD
Modern public domain music and audio clips.
IMSLP Petrucci Music Library
Featuring over 24,000 sound recordings and more than 240,000 scores from 7,663 composers.
Jamendo
Allows users to download and listen to content that is under one of the Creative Commons licenses.
Jazz On Line
"The Jazz On Line website wish to provide access to the American music, in particular the jazz music. This American music was recorded on 78 rpm shellac discs."
Musopen
"focused on improving access and exposure to music by creating free resources and educational materials. We provide recordings, sheet music, and textbooks to the public for free, without copyright restrictions. Put simply, our mission is to set music free."
Mutopia Project
"The Mutopia Project offers sheet music editions of classical music for free download. These are based on editions in the public domain, and include works by Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Handel, Mozart, and many others."
Open Music Archive
"Open Music Archive is a collaborative project, initiated by artists Eileen Simpson & Ben White, to source, digitize and distribute out-of-copyright sound recordings. "
OpSound
"Musicians and sound artists are invited to add their work to the Opsound pool using a copyleft license developed by Creative Commons. Listeners are invited to download, share, remix, and reimagine."
Archive.org - Audio
"This library contains over two hundred thousand free digital recordings ranging from alternative news programming, to Grateful Dead concerts, to Old Time Radio shows, to book and poetry readings, to original music uploaded by our users."

Featured Resource

"Looking for music for a video, school project, game you’re developing? Find exactly the music you’re looking for, liberally licensed, using dig.ccMixter ."

dig.ccMixter

Audio

LibriVox
LibriVox provides free audiobooks from the public domain.
Freesound
"Freesound aims to create a huge collaborative database of audio snippets, samples, recordings, bleeps, ... released under Creative Commons licenses that allow their reuse."

License

Be sure to check the license information on all linked content. The linked material has been chosen as examples of Public Domain and Creative Commons Licensed works, however, it is the researcher's obligation to determine any use restrictions when republishing or otherwise distributing materials from the linked sites.