Research Guides: Music: Audio and Video

Howard B. Waltz Music Library

303-492-8093

libraries@colorado.edu

Finding Sound and Video Recordings at CU Boulder

The Howard B. Waltz Music Library is home to tens of thousands of sound and video recordings. The best way to find them is by searching the library catalog. Enter keywords for ensembles, performers, or composition title.

Find Sound Effects

Freesound
Freesound is a collaborative database of Creative Commons Licensed sounds. Browse, download and share sounds.
Soundbible
The Royalty Free Sounds section includes public domain and Creative Commons licenses.

Video Resources

medici.tv
Live performances of classical music. Includes concerts, operas, ballets, documentaries, master classes and jazz programs.
Qwest TV EDU (Alexander Street)
Streaming videos of jazz and related music. Includes archival footage of iconic composers and performers, documentaries, and recent concerts.
Berliner Philharmoniker Digital Concert Hall
The Berliner Philharmoniker Digital Concert hall provides more than 40 live concerts per season. In addition, there is access to archived performances, as well as interviews and documentaries.
Access note: Log in required. Register for a free account with your colorado.edu email address. Resource only available for current CU Boulder faculty, staff, and students.
Met Opera on Demand
Online access to 550 full-length performances from the Metropolitan Opera. Includes interviews with artists, composers, conductors, and others associated with an individual production.
Kanopy
Kanopy offers over 8,500 streaming films, documentaries, educational and training videos from an array of producers and distributors including BBC Active and Criterion Collection/Janus films. All videos work on PCs with Flash, iPads, iPhones, and mobile devices.
Digital Theatre+
Videos of live theatre performances as well as insights from behind the scenes. Also included are educational resources from leading practitioners and academics.
BroadwayHD Academic (Alexander Street)
BroadwayHD offers live theatre performances online, extending the reach of Broadway and Broadway-caliber shows to anyone, anywhere.
Operavision
Live-streaming and archived operas, concerts, and competitions from major companies and performance venues in Europe.

Music Online: Opera in Video
Music Online: Opera in Video contains five hundred hours of the most important opera performances, captured on video through staged productions, interviews, and documentaries. Selections represent the world’s best performers, conductors, and opera houses and are based on a work’s importance to the operatic canon.

Music Online: Classical Music in Video
Music Online: Classical Music in Video will contain 1,000 hours of classical music performances and masterclasses captured on video—approximately 1,500 performances in all. The collection will contain performances of all forms of classical music, including major orchestral performances by leading orchestras, plus chamber music, oratorio, and solo performances, along with masterclasses and interviews with master teachers from around the world.

Audio Resources

Music Online: Listening (Alexander Street)
Collection of Classical music records featuring music from the earliest times to the present.
Naxos Music Library
Comprehensive streaming audio database for classical repertoire.
Naxos Music Library Jazz
Collection of streaming jazz recordings spanning the history of the genre.
Music Online: Smithsonian Global Sound for Libraries (Alexander Street)
This collection is a virtual encyclopedia of the world's musical and aural traditions, providing access to a variety of online resources that support the creation, continuity, and preservation of diverse musical forms.
Ethnographic Sound Archives Online (Alexander Street)
Over 2,000 hours of historic field recordings from around the world, alongside their supporting field notes and ethnographers metadata, for the study of music in its cultural context.
Great 78 Project
The Great 78 Project is a community project for the preservation, research and discovery of 78rpm records. It is a partnership between the ARChive of Contemporary Music and Internet Archive that digitizes and preserves rare and lesser known audio content.