The Freepats site ( http://alsa.opensrc.org/FreePats ) is a project trying to collect instrument sound samples under Open Source licensing so that it can be used for a variety of projects. I'll give a short tutorial on one way you can make use of sound samples in your own videos below, but first I'd like to ask for volunteers. Anyone who can help them out by recording midi instrument samples or any interesting instrument sound samples, please help add more samples to the site. Please let anyone who might be interested know about the project and the need for volunteers as well. Thanks.


Now, a tutorial on how to use instrument samples in your videos...

You can use soundfonts to help create background music for your videos. If you read music notation, you can start with sheet music and abc2midi to create midi files of public domain songs for your videos. If you do not read sheet music, you can use search engines to search for the appropriate abc or midi music to use in your project. Here are a few search engines:
http://www.vanbasco.com/
http://ecf-guest.mit.edu/~jc/cgi/abc/findtune
If you need more help in converting abc to midi or some tips on where to find public domain sheet music, see:
http://www.distasis.com/recipes/music.htm

Once the music is in midi format, you can use Timidity to turn it into a wave file. This is where the soundfonts come in. You can configure Timidity to use soundfonts of your choice such as those from the Freepats site. The better the soundfont, the better the quality of the music and the more realistic it sounds. If you don't have access to instruments and/or can't play, it's a great way to have an entire orchestra at your disposal. If you're creating your own original work with public domain music to avoid licensing issues, you'll want to use public domain or Open Source soundfonts to create the sounds as well. That's where the Freepats site comes in, helping to provide soundfonts that are licensed in such a way they can be used legally in any type of project.

After you've create a wave file, you can add it to the background of your audio soundtrack or replace your audio soundtrack with it. For a video I had in AVI format, I used Windows Movie Maker to mute the original soundtrack and then add various wave files in to replace it. I saved the result as AVI and converted to MPEG 2 and was ready to use my favorite authoring tool to create a video. Mencoder is one of the programs that can convert from AVI to MPEG if you need a conversion tool.

Another option is to demux an MPEG file into ac3 and m1v or m2v files. You can use a program such as mplex (available with DVDStyler or the mjpeg tools at Sourceforge). If you want to keep the current audio, convert the ac3 file to wave using a tool like BeSweet or one of the GUI front ends to BeSweet. Edit using Audacity. You can combine the current wave file soundtrack with your music files. Convert your finished wave file back to ac3 using a tool like Aften or one of the GUI front ends for it. If you're DVD authoring program handles demultiplexed audio and video files, you're ready to author. If not, put the files back together with mplex.

You'll find links to most of the tools mentioned above in the Tools section of the VideoHelp.com site.