#Wednesday – doing hands-on hardware/fabrication work all day, so I get to listen to the radio. :)
I find public radio, or even music-with-lyrics too distracting if I'm doing work tasks like reading, writing or coding. On such days I usually listen to jazz, café chatter sounds (thx to #FreeSound) or nothing.
TIL: The "beeps" in #NASA's #Apollo missions are called #Quindar tones, named after the company that produced the equipment.
There is an "intro" and an "outro" tone. They were generated when CapCom (the person in the control center tasked with talking to the astronauts) pushed the transmit button. Since there were several transmitters on earth, connected to Houston via telephone, this was an in-band signal causing them to activate, transmit, then deactivate again.
Just converted a 267 MiB #Freesound WAV file into a 65 MiB one by
• removing one of the channels (it's a mono recording, but a stereo file)
• downsampling from 44.1 to 32 kHz (it's an iPhone mic, there were no frequencies over 16.500 in the file, and I don't care about a tiny bit of spectrum; this is a field recording in a subway, not an orchestra)
• converting from 24 to 16 bits (again, remember, this is "CD quality")
This is now a quarter of the original file size, and it sounds identical!
lol ok this might seem trivial to some of you, but I'm currently working on this week's #WeeklyBeats track, and looking for a soundscape to go in the background – and playing the sketch of the song through the same speakers, mixed with some #Freesound clips playing on my computer is really helpful to imagine how the end result is going to sound like, and what fits and what doesn't.
"Weeklybeats is a 52 week long music project in which artists compose and publicly release 1 song a week for the entire year. Starting January 1st 2024 GMT each participant will have one week to upload one finished composition. Any style of music or selection of instruments are welcomed and encouraged."
This is yet another standalone #Deluge track. It's being carried almost exclusively by #Freesound samples, but after browsing samples for half a day I have to say that sample selection is work, too.
It also made me appreciate commercial sample collections more, because the quality at Freesound is mostly … mediocre.
Still, I think it would have been better if #Freesound.org would have never allowed non-libre sounds (like -NC) to begin with, but it's better than nothing.
I mean, #Wikimedia Commons has been proving for a very long time it's possible.
My #HomeAssistant setup plays a little audible tuba melody over my hacked speaker system when a human figure is detected in the driveway, so garbage day is a bit like Octoberfest around here.
"Hey, this FreeSound clip will actually work, I'll be done without a multi-hour search for once aaaaand it forbids commercial use." #gamedev#sound#sfx#freesound