Public Domain Sound Archives?

Booker asks: "Are there any public domain repositories for sounds? Sort of like Propaganda for your speakers? Audio cues can really enhance a desktop design, but most of what is currently out there consists of a small number of bleeps, bloops, and buzzes. Of the window managers / desktops which do ship some default sounds (E, gnome, KDE...), where did those come from? If someone were to start such a repository, what should the file format be?"

www.samplenet.co.uk

[Bazman]

Although really intended for musicians, samplenet has a section of sound FX and vocal samples that might be useful in a desktop environment. And whats more:

Q. Can I use the samples on my recordings?

A. Of course! All of SampleNet's samples are copyright free.

WWW interface here [samplenet.co.uk], also available via ftp. I managed to nab the entire archive and burn it to two CD's for convenience... Baz

Re:sound archive ideas

[Booker]

Isn't that sort of like saying "how can a loosely knit band of hackers with no central authority produce quality software?" :)

I see what you mean, though... there would probably be a lot of crap. And a lot of copyright infringing stuff. (It is hard to resist putting in some H.A.L. samples, for example...)

As far as quality goes, though, if it was generated from a synthesizer, rather than an analog recording, the quality would be good... most sound effects I've heard for window managers seem to be synthesized sounds.

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sound archive ideas

[timothy]

pub domain sound archives could be useful for much more than desktop noises, though that's a perfectly good use:)

I'd like to see (and there may actually be, but I'm not familiar with any) a site dedicated to preserving the audio information that defines our culture, and the world ...

I remember reading about some guy who was part of an international tape-swapping club who recorded the sounds of various New Zealand rivers ... seems trivial or silly maybe, but I am a sound enthusiast, so I really like that idea. Not that you could really tell fine distinctions on a cassette, though;)

I sometimes like to walk around with my Sony recorder just listening to things, then playing it back and recalling the visual info along with the audio.

Format? I agree with the poster who said that AIFF was smart, since it is high quality and can be encoded easily, but it seems to me like a more intelligent approach would be to have some high-quality standard for the sounds available whenever possible, but also compressed versions, so visitors can have a choice between file sizes:

-------------------------------------

SOUNDFILE "Gunshot: Springfield .45 autopistol fires three times"

455509987as - 16-bit AIFF stereo

455509987bs - MP3 (256) stereo

455509987cm - MP3 (128) mono

455509987dm - 8-bit mono

-------------------------------------------

So long as there is a high-quality original always available to those who want to do their own tweaking, it would seem nice to have a script generate a range of other sizes, to minimize bandwidth requirements for the folks on both ends.

Also, what I'd like to see in such a sound archive is detailed info on the source and circumstances of the recording.

Just a small textfile would be plenty ...

timothy

Re:sound archive ideas

[GooseKirk]

Earthstation1 is the only site I've seen so far that's along the lines of a cultural audio repository. It's, uh, not the greatest web design I've ever seen, and in the past few years they've really saturated the site with bad advertising... but ya gotta give the guy props for makin' the effort. It's more than I've done.

http://www.earthstation1.com/
And hey, where else are you going to find Shooby Taylor .wavs?

Re:sound archive ideas

[technos]

A high quality copy needs a high quality source recording.. I have a couple of CD's worth of AIFF soundfiles from an ad agency, and some of them sound like the were sampled on a SB-8 from a mag faded mono reel.

These were hardcore professionals. If the database were made up of user contributions houw could the quality be guaranteed when the profs don't even manage it all of the time? Most samples would be made by amateurs by a consumer soundcard from an analog recording made on some of the worst equipment imaginable.

Sound Format is Easy

[randombit]

Use WAV (actually I think I mean AIFF, but you know what I mean). Why? Because (assuming you make these things really totally copyright free [which is the right choice for something like this IMHO]), people can use sox or bladeenc or whatever to convert them to the formats they want. WAV is kind of big, but I think for the kind of sounds you're thinking of [small stuff 10 seconds long], that would be OK.

Make sure you include the clip of Linus used in sndconfig (at least on Redhat it is). It's not very clear though: took me about 10 tries before I finally figured out what it was. Yes, I reran sndconfig, even though my sound card was working fine, because I wanted to hear the test sound. Sad, huh? (Yeah I could just play /usr/share/sndconfig/sample.au, but I didn't think of that at the time).

use WAV...

[Cryptnotic]

Wav is one of those few things that Micros~1 did right.

It's a pretty simple header that enumerates the sample width, format and stereo-mono information. The header is followed by the actual samples.

It's pretty clean. Somehow they managed to get it done without adding in all kinds of components and drag and drop and embedded scripting... like they did with all the other Micros~1 technologies. ;-)