Music can make or break any video or movie, but finding the right piece is the hardest part. If you don't have an orchestra or band to record the perfect song every time you need it, there are many services now that offer music with different licensing options depending on your needs and budget. The Music Bed is one such service, and they have been used for all sorts of videos you've probably seen on the web. The company just introduced a brand new version of their site with a number of helpful new features. Continue on to check out the launch video.

You may get lucky and find some music with a free Creative Commons license online (I've been pretty lucky with some videos, and found absolutely nothing for others), but more often than not the right piece of music will be available on one of these online music services, and The Music Bed's 5.0 website aims to make the whole process even simpler, and ensure that a license fits your actual needs.

Here is more on what's new:

Every Song Retagged and Recategorized from Scratch

For the past six months, during every moment of every day, five members of The Music Bed team have been relistening to our entire song catalog — three times through. Everything has been retagged and recategorized to be more accurate and more intuitive. Oh, and we’ve improved our vocal tags, too: ambient, choirs, duets, oohs and ahs, male/female — you name it, we’ll find it.

Multitag Searching

Not only are our tags better, but now you can search multiple tags at a time. Want something that’s both post-rock and cinematic? How about something folky with a little bit of tuba? Find exactly what you’re looking for every time. (Wandering, though, is still encouraged.)

Searchable Characteristics

You can now search for songs based on their characteristics: atmospheric, distorted, easy listening, funky, glitch, groovy, the list goes on.

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And one of the more interesting new features:

Visual Waveforms

Now you can literally see if the music is going to work for your project — where it builds, where it falls away. No more scrubbing around for the right moments. No more guessing games.

That last one is really key. I've been happy with a lot of what The Music Bed has to offer -- sometimes it actually feels like there are too many songs that could work well -- but it was actually very time-consuming if you needed a specific piece that moved in just the right way at the right time. Rather than scrubbing, seeing the waveform should save a lot of time so you can go right to the moments that may work for your particular video.

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Creating an account is free, and the site will now save every song you've played, so you can always go back and find what you listened to rather than needing to manually save each song. And if you're really short on time, the playlists feature is something that I don't believe any other sites are offering. You can quickly find what's popular right now among people in , rather than spending hours searching (though sometimes that can be fun with all of the interesting options).

They are in the process of updating their iOS app to coincide with these new changes, but in the meantime head on over to The Music Bed 5.0 site to check out what they have to offer.

Link: The Music Bed

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Sound & Music