Finding free music and sounds online
As with pictures, the usual suspect for finding free audio tracks online is again Wikimedia Commons. This is a huge database of multimedia elements, and we can find interesting stuff there. But before we look into these, let's start with the basics of audio formats so that we can pick better files for our courses.
The basics of audio formats
In our everyday life, we can find music and sound in several formats. The most common of these formats are:
PCM: This is the standard format used in CDs. It is a uncompressed audio format, which implies large file sizes—around 10MB per minute.
WAV: WAV is usually used to store the PCM file format. It can contain audio in several rates and bitrates (these are concepts that we will see in a moment).
MP3: MPEG Layer 3 is one of the most common audio formats on the Web. It is also the name of the codec that reduces original audio files sizes (for example, depending on the bitrate and rate, a CD track can be reduced...
