I’m sure there’s not a person out there working in media today who hasn’t at least heard of iStockphoto. The stock photo house has been a staple of affordability and convenience in the stock photo world for a long time. A couple of years ago they added video to the mix. For the last year or so they have been acquiring audio clips and that service recently launched. That’s not just sound effects and foley type stuff but music! From the iStockaudio website:
“Many sites claim to sell royalty-free audio, but iStock actually does. You can use our iStock tracks as many times as you like, wherever you like. So what’s the big deal? Our tracks include public performance, synchronization and mechanical licenses. We provide you with everything you need”.
Since it is iStock the media is sold via credits. Basic is 2 credits, detailed 5, complex 15 and elaborate 25. All the usual search features are there for audio as well. When previewing audio clips you can play directly from a search results page or click into a particular result for more detail. Audio clips can be added to a lightbox like photos and video and you can download an mp3 comp of the clips as well. Of course all of the audio samples have the phrase “istock audio” repeated over and over and over throughout the clip. But that’s to be expected. There’s even a nice waveform preview of the clips as well:
Over all the quality is decent. Of all the music I sampled many had a bit of the electronic / canned / Garageband sound to it but there were some gems that I really liked. When searching for a mood like “sadness” most returned results are shorter clips with the more complete songs, longer than one or two minutes, scattered in the search results. It would be great if there was an option to only return results over a certain length so if you were searching for a full song for you film you wouldn’t have to wade through all of the stings and short clips. There hasn’t been many downloads yet but give it time … I’m sure people will come to rely on iStockaudio like we do for photos, illustrations, Flash and video. Someday we might even have iStockpizza!