Open - free to use and repurpose
Free - free to use
Affordable - available at low cost
Free North Shore - available to NSCC students and faculty
Do you have a comment or question about the Open Educational Resources guide? Contact us at library@northshore.edu.
The Sheet Music Consortium provides a collection of digital sheet music for open educaitonal use. Additionally, where possible, the resource includes case-covers and advertisements connected to the music sheet.
The Open Education Podcasts at University of Oxford provides thousands of course-based lectures on hundreds of courses, most of which are available as open educational resources. Visitors can stream audio through the site or download each lecture as an MP3.
Dig.CCMixter provides open music and sound files that users can integrate into a variety of multimedia projects such as videos, podcasts, presentations, etc.
The Free Music Archive is an interactive library of high-quality, legal audio downloads directed by WFMU. Every mp3 on the Free Music Archive is pre-cleared for certain types of uses that would otherwise be prohibited by copyright laws that were not designed for the digital era. These uses vary and are determined by the rightsholders themselves.
Thousands of audio clips in the public domain from the collection of the Pond5 stock footage company.
A collaborative database of audio snippets, samples, recordings, bleeps, and more. Freesound aims to create a huge collaborative database of audio snippets, samples, recordings, bleeps, ... released under Creative Commons licenses that allow their reuse.
The Internet Archive's Audio Collection includes a wide range of sound materials. It has a vast collection of old time radio, thousands of books and poems in audio, podcasts, radio news programming, music, and more. All materials are in the public domain.
The British Library Sounds contains an impressive assortment of sound materials that includes performances, oral history, sound maps, various music (classical, jazz, traditional, etc), and even sound recordings focused on accents, dialects, environment, and nature sounds. Much of the material is made available to the public. However, some materials are restricted to European Union users.
The Library of Congress presents the National Jukebox, which makes historical sound recordings available to the public free of charge.
A collection of free downloadable music and sound effects for use in video or audio projects. Look for CC Licenses and read copyright policy.
A growing collection of almost 43 million freely usable media files to which anyone can contribute. Click here for sound.
All sounds in the Opsound pool are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license (a copyleft license similar to those used in the free and open source software communities) or are placed in the public domain (the license information for each song can be found under the song link).
This means you are free (and encouraged) to download works, make copies, share them, include them in other works, remix and rearrange them, and even sell them.