Musicbed DV’s single-screen interface makes it easy to customize the tone of the music to the picture.

Creating compelling, captivating musical scores for your video projects can be a daunting challenge. But with Musicbed DV, you have a truly useful tool to make royalty-free soundtracks. Perfect for commercial projects, it delivers smooth music with minimum effort.

You import your QuickTime video into Musicbed DV’s single-window interface. Then you can scrub through the video and find time points for major changes of mood or scene, and place markers in the timeline to indicate where the tone of the music needs to change. To make things even easier, you could create only two markers (at the beginning and end), choose one of the 23 scores, and click the Add Music Clip button, which automatically places the music into the timeline, complete with an intro, multiple middle sections, and a finale. It’s trivial to slide the beginning and end of each section to fit the precise timing of the video to ensure perfect synchronization. Tempo and pitch can be adjusted without introducing artifacts into the sound, adding even more flexibility.

Musicbed DV lets you customize the scores by creating keyframes for a variety of musical parameters, including the balance between smooth and punchy, percussive and melodic, and synthetic and organic. You can control how each of these flavors changes over time, with effortless keyframe adjustments and visual envelope controls displayed in the timeline. This lets you tailor the tone and mood of the music to closely match your video, and the real-time previews make it easy to create smooth transitions. The overall result sounds like a live musician scored your soundtrack, and that soundtrack can be exported in the most popular audio formats, complete with support for both stereo and surround sound.

The software comes bundled with two sets of music (dubbed Seasons 1 and 2) that deliver 23 distinct musical scores - some calmer and slower, and others more exciting and dynamic. There’s also a tension-laden score for dramatic scenes. The actual quality of the compositions is quite high, though you’re not going to find symphonic scores that would put the London Philharmonic to shame - most of the music tends toward more modern tastes. You can listen to demos of all of the musical passages on Synk Audio’s website, a great way to see if the music could fit your project’s needs.

The bottom line. Musicbed DV is an excellent tool for anyone needing high-quality music for video projects. We’ll be curious to see how the publisher supports the product with future expansion packs, but the bundled music should keep you happy for at least a trilogy of films.

COMPANY: Synk Audio

CONTACT: www.synkaudiostudios.com
PRICE: $249

REQUIREMENTS: G4 or later or Intel processor, Mac OS 10.4 or later, 512MB RAM, 18GB free disk space
Lovely musical scores. Flexible customization possibilities. Excellent ease of use. Universal binary.

Music might not be perfect for all genres of video or film.