Free Music To Score Your YouTube Videos

Free Music To Score Your YouTube Videos - by David R Beebe
I've been a long time customer of Fresh Music and they are my go-to source for pay-to-license royalty free music. This is important if you want to monetize a You Tube video for example. If you have a personal You Tube video, you are allowed to license for free music from Free Play Music with the agreement that they get to monetize your video with ads. If that fits your needs, here is the workflow I use with Safari and iTunes to efficiently download tracks.

Preparations
Launch Archive Utility and set preferences to expand archives in place, move archive to trash once expanded & uncheck reveal expanded items in Finder
Create a new folder for Safari to download into or empty the one you normally use
Open the iTunes library you created for licensed music for scoring your videos (see Managing Multiple iTunes Libraries, 4/17/13)
Get music from FreePlayMusic.com

Create a free account if you don't have one at freeplaymusic.com
Browse their catalog, sample and select the albums or songs
Click on your shopping cart
Select all and choose the appropriate license agreement - in this case personal YouTube is appropriate but there are other options available
Proceed to checkout
Accept the Master Recording Sync agreement
There is no mass download so you have to manually right click on each Download button and select Download

Import into iTunes
There are a number of ways to do this, Add to Library being one of those. I prefer a different workflow
Create a new playlist - I call mine FreePlay YouTube License
Drag the downloaded music folders from the Safari download location into the new playlist
From the File menu, pull down to Library: Organize Library and check Consolidate Files which will move them into your library
The reason I do this is because FreePlay doesn't always show an Artist Name on a track. I select all tracks in the play list and do a mass change of artist name to FreePlay YouTube
I have a similar Smart Playlist called FreePlayYouTube that shows all tracks I've licensed from them only for YouTube use so that I can select that playlist from within FCP
Empty out the working FreePlay YouTube License

Clean Up
Move the contents of the Safari Download folder to the trash and empty it
If you are not actively working on a video edit, remember to switch your iTunes library back before you plug your iOS device in for a sync!