While there have been many efforts to define community music, definitions have tended to be either too specific or too general to be of great use to practitioners. Much of the published research on the topic seems to be based on single projects, often conducted by the facilitators involved. While this has led to valuable contributions to understanding the scope and breadth of this field, it has done little to create perspectives that can be applied across the wide gamut of practices referred to as community music activities. Sound links, an extensive research project conducted in Australia with support from the Australian Research Council, has compared six divergent practices across the country with a consistent - principally ethnographic - methodology, yielding a wealth of insights into the working of this phenomenon. One of the key outcomes of the project is not a new definition of community music, but rather a framework that maps out the key 'ingredients' of successful practices across demographic, geographic, cultural, and contextual variations. These enable better understanding, planning, execution and evaluation of community music activities.