Adding music to timelapse

I make the monthly video using the Movie Maker Windows app (free and built into the operating system). It's not an elegant system, but pretty straightforward when you get the hang of it.

Finding free-to-use royalty-free music is a bit tricky. Googling helps but you do have to be careful about what sites you click onto. Some can be dodgy. Our first videos used a website called MelodyLoops but while that's royalty-free, it's not free to use. There's a one-off payment per piece of music, I think.

I've used yourclassical.org and incompetech.com - but be careful you click on website buttons and not on advert buttons! Licensing under 'creative commons' (rather than buying a license) generally means free to use as long as you credit the artist/website.

Sumitra used Jamendo.com for a Perseids timelapse she did a few years ago and that seems good.

Hi Clive, I have not made many timelapses but for all of mine, I buy tracks for a pound (or a few more pounds for a complete album if I like it) from an indie publishing music platform at www.bandcamp.com.   Many of those songs have "some rights reserved" which allows re-use for anything as long as they are credited and of course those are the songs I use.   The search facility absolutely sucks though as can only search with one tag at a time.  So you either have to search "etherial" tags and plough through the songs that "some rights reserved" or use tag "creative-commons" for all songs with that have "some rights reserved".

But I find Bandcamp to have a lot great music for "pay whatever you want to pay" as oppose to free royalty free music sites which I find to be rather lacking in quality, generally.

My timelapse workflow is using Adobe Bridge and Camera Raw (both in combination is actually equivalent to Lightroom) to batch process frames and assembling the timelapse.  Then a couple of times I use VirtualDub with Deflickr plugin to remove flickering and give a smoother transition of changing light in timelapses.   Then finally I add a music track and final touch ups in either Adobe Effects or Windows Movie maker.

But you can achieve the whole workflow with completely open source software and I intend to try out some with my next timelapse as my Adobe suite is getting old and I dont want to subscribe to CC.