Public Domain Sound Archives? 7
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 (Score:2)
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 (Score:2)
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 (Score:2)
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
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
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 (Score:1)
http://www.earthstation1.com/
And hey, where else are you going to find Shooby Taylor
Re:sound archive ideas (Score:2)
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 (Score:2)
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
use WAV... (Score:1)
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. ;-)