Best ambient sound site I've encountered so far. I love the DIY mixing approach. :)
Gabriel - please add wind. It goes well with the rain/thunder thing. The rain sound track - it sounds realistic, but I think for this specific purpose a bit less emphasis on high frequencies might make it blend into the background better. It sounds a little too hissy. Might just be my sound setup though. I'd also suggest adding a "true" white noise track - I'm guessing much of the tech crowd would love to use that as a baseline and then add specific noises on top.
Wind would be a great addition I agree. I've had a hard time finding good audio that has the right feel, but it'll be added at some point.
White noise is on the todo list. What I really need to do is make the audio loading more modular. At the moment it's very naive and everything buffers at once. I want to create a system where there's a core set of sounds that load by default, and then a menu of sounds that expand and load when selected. This would mean I could support a lot more sounds. At present, to add another sample I'd have to remove something already there, because performance is a little flaky even with just the six current samples.
I really wouldn't change the layout to anything menu like. Its got the clean & simple thing going for it. Maybe rather add a button that opens "advanced" options i.e. more sliders coming into view - white noise etc. Seems a bit artificial but it gives you a way to split off less popular and weird stuff like artificial white noise. Plus delayed loading of those sounds. Adding a drop down or similar would kill the clean layout in my view.
Since you reacted positively to the initial feedback:
- The share mix button at the top looks wildly out of place. Its outside of the main rectangle and looks weird as a result.
-I'm allergic to the word "share" tbh...consider replacing it with "publish"/"broadcast" or similar. Sounds a bit presumptuous...but "share" has become a seriously craptastic word online - even erotic sites have a "share on facebook" button. If you must have it rather move it as far down as possible - so that users can first toy with the sliders a bit & get a feel for things before being asked to vouch for it to friends.
- The colour scheme (stark black white) is not conducive to the tranquil vibe you're trying to convey. Best bet is adding some colour hint to it I think. Keep the basic idea, but add some faint highlight colour(s). Think earthy warm colours.
- The humans track is way too loud. If you set all the sliders to mid then all you hear is humans. Either lower it as a whole or dampen the 600hz-700hz frequency range gently (assuming my ears aren't failing me on that freq guestimate).
>I've had a hard time finding good audio that has the right feel
Yeah. Wind is a bit of a biatch in this regard since most microphones are engineered to specifically block wind noises. And those that aren't distort wind sounds like mad. Maybe something like this (bit short):
I struggled a bit with the positioning of the share button - I'll think about it some more. I hadn't considered that it's the first thing a new visitor sees, and I agree that's undesirable.
I used the wrong word when I said "menu". I actually had "palette of sounds" down before changing it because it sounded too pretentious. I was thinking of menu in the restaurant sense rather than the UI sense. I agree I don't want to overload the interface with more options.
I'm not 100% happy with the visuals or the audio samples either, particularly humans and rain as has been pointed out, so I'm going to look at cleaning them up.
Rustling leaves...I like the idea of that. Its fairly difficult to come up with generic background noises that are calming at the same time. Leaves sound like a good bet though.
It has always seemed strange to me that some people find hostile weather sounds calming - Wind, heavy rain, thunder... those can all potentially damage the building you are in. Fire too (I like the sound of a fire only if I can see it.) Leaves would be a good addition though. So would a waterfall (there is a significant difference between a waterfall and rain.)
To be honest it never even occurred to me to classify it as "hostile".
I think its fairly dependent on the climate you grew up in. e.g. I'm from a fairly warm/dry climate so "storm" sounds mean rain & relief from heat. Plus the local farmers are much happier (except when there is hail involved).
>damage the building you are in
Again - never occurred to me. Its just a non-issue here. Buildings are built to last & we don't get natural disasters here.
I associate these sounds with the act of sheltering from these elements, which prevents all kinds of physical activities and encourages passive, calm ones. A tendency towards hibernation and hot chocolate by a fireplace, a calm and pleasant association. Even if I focus on the negative aspects -- getting caught out in the rain and being cold and wet, I generally bundle up and conserve my energy rather than start jogging... not positive, but still calm.
Sufficiently strong weather and uncontrolled fires could put you at risk, but the extremely vast majority of my experience with these sounds has been with the safe varieties -- I don't think I'd find it as calming otherwise.
Once you said that rain sounded hissy, I immediately noticed it. If I turn rain almost all the way down and waves just a little bit up, I get a muffled rain sound that sounds a little bit like rain falling on a tent that I'm inside, which I now realize is one of my favorite sounds. So add that sound too!
Nice. I love the minimal approach. Another site like yours is http://www.NatureSoundsFor.Me which has a whole bunch of other sounds like bees, cicadas, sheep, whales, and more. I like your UI better though, it's super simple and feels like an app. I made one too a while back http://TimeforZen.com but it's in bad need of a redesign.
I LOVE your "Fade to Slient in ___ minutes" feature. Perfect for inducing sleep.
I'm really curious about TimeforZen (based on your titles for the various tracks) but none of the them load for me (Chromium/Firefox on Debian testing).
I'd appreciate if the sounds mixture could slowly but constantly change, going from the "it's going to rain soon" mix to the "it's pouring rain" mix to the "sunny with hints of birds" mix.
Fabulous! Best of breed for creating ambiance that I've heard and the suggestions here are bound to improve it.
It works from Firefox browser on a phone (sliders don't function with Chrome and it fades out immediately on Dolphin and Android browsers.) An equalizer (even Baxendahl 2 knob tone control) would be cool but would probably be a drag on the server.
FWIW regarding sleeping to ambient sound, I have an extensive collection of 'phones and 'buds of all types for R&D purposes and the hands down winner for 'buds to sleep with is the Sennheiser CX200.
(Irrelevant aside: For $19 at Amazon they are also by far the best bargain I've encountered for pristine sound.)
I'm sure it would be a major effort, but it'd be nice to have the tracks crossfade into one another; right now, when a given track ends, there's a short and variable, but noticeable, interval between ending and restarting, whose presence is not a major issue but still less preferable than its absence.
There's actually a feature built in to mimic cross-fading; it must have not worked for you, and that worries me a little. What browser and OS are you using please?
It's not possible to do true seamless looping with HTML5 audio, but the site tries to achieve it by crossfading, as you say, using two tracks for each sample. On my setup the transition is imperceptible. I'd like to work out why it didn't work for you.
Thanks for taking an interest! The browser which showed the problem was Firefox 24.2.0esr on Windows 7; I haven't yet tried the site in any other browsers, but I'm about to fire up my Mac and I'll give it a shot in Safari when I do. One other note: At the time I noticed the problem, I was having some slight latency issues, such that the TCP handshake could take up to 3-5 seconds to complete; I haven't tried it since that cleared up, and it seems possible that could've been the cause.
Safari 6.1, Mac OS X - Listened to "Thunder" track for 10 minutes; no noticeable break.
Firefox 24.0, Mac OS X - Did likewise; result likewise.
I'll have to try it again from home tonight and see whether it behaves better in the absence of the latency problem. Sorry for being so vague; I tend to try to characterize bug reports better than I have this one, but I was in the middle of too many things when I wrote my original comment and didn't take the time I should've.
Thanks for following up. The system is quite sensitive to connection issues as the cross-fading only lasts 5 seconds or so. Glad it seems to be working now.
Thanks to last night's unpredictable behavior on the part of my ISP (thanks, Comcast!), I can confirm that the gaps I was hearing are latency-bound. Thanks again for a nifty service!
I would be great if you could a) download your mix as an MP3 and/or b) open your mix in a popup window.
Love the sound of rain and thunder. Makes me want to stay indoors and do stuff. I understand that this is at the moment not a problem for North Americans and Europeans but in Australia it's getting pretty hot/sticky at the moment..
Downloading as an mp3 is an interesting idea. It would be a good excuse for me to learn some backend stuff. This is the first thing I've ever written but I enjoyed the process a lot.
The popup window idea is also good and should be much easier to implement. I'll look into it. Thanks!
Also, having a global volume might be handy so you push the entire sound to the background without having it affect the sound if you happen play a YouTube video or whatever.
Dig into it by googling around. MP3 is probably a lot harder than other audio formats though - look into encoding a format that is widely usable such as WAV or anything you can open in iTunes and Windows Media Player etc. The downloadable content part is part of recent JS additions, google around.
- maybe you could add some trees or forest option - coupled with birds it makes a good spring/summer ambient
- when decreasing the human option, instead of just decreasing the loudness, it should decrease the number of people speaking ; so many people in the background, even if they seem far, doesn't make this too cozy
This is great, and I'll use this while working. I love certain sounds, but not every types of noise, so it's great to be able to choose the combination.
There's a lot of ASMR youtube videos, which I find very relaxing and helps to get in the zone. However, sometimes it also helps me to fall asleep, which is bad when I want to work. Anyway, ASMR puts me in a state that is highly focused and relaxed at the same time.
The most soothing, easy-to-sleep-to sound for me is the sound of the forced-hot-air furnace in the house I grew up in. Other furnaces in other houses are OK, but nothing tops the original.
I assume this is something deep in my psyche, implanted when I was very young.
I relax the best when there are other people at my house, doing their own thing. I remember from being 5 or so when my parents would have company over and it was a very reassuring feeling of hearing other people carrying on. Unfortunately, as an "adult", it doesn't seem to be very socially acceptable to throw parties then stay upstairs and hope your guests enjoy things by themselves.
This motivation is very deep inside me: I went as far as giving out two free rooms to benefit from the comings-and-goings of two more people. And for a while I shared a house with my in-laws (8 people total) and found it quite enjoyable.
I haven't found a way to make it work on iOS devices, unfortunately. There are many restrictions on what javascript is allowed to do, and I don't own an iOS device for testing ways around this.
Unfortunately limitations on mobile audio will make this next to impossible to work on mobile for the time being. I wrote howler.js (http://howlerjs.com) to solve this issue, but I'm guessing your source audio files are too large to use Web Audio reliably on mobile (this would be the only way to play multiple sounds at the same time).
There is another way actually, use an HTML5 Audio tag and Base64 encode the audio files, then load that data via JavaScript into the Audio tag.
I really should probably write this up on my blog... I will - and post it on HN but here's a quick overview. I'm doing this for a JavaScript library I'm working on for form-validation for the visually-impaired (coming soon!)
I dynamically create a pool of audio tags via
var audioTag = document.createElement("audio")
then
audioTag.setAttribute("autoplay","autoplay");
then
audioTag.src = strSound;
You don't even have to attach them to the DOM either from my experience so far (cross-browser!), just maintain the reference in memory.
Then I do some eventing magic for forms and validation stuff, loading the audio from strings of Base64 encoded mp3s or wavs. This way I can package the audio I use inside the JavaScript that hooks up all the form events. And make it easy for others to override my audio samples with their own just by over-writing the strings in memory via their own .js file include.
I should note that a pool of audio tags allows you to play multiple sounds at once. I've tested my lib with up to 200 simultaneous samples playing at once on a lark, since I don't need anywhere near that sort of coverage.
I'm pretty sure it does as I vaguely remember testing my proof-of-concept via the iPhone Simulator in xCode, though I haven't touched it in a bit with the holidays.
I'm working up a simplified example to post right now. My library has a lot of extraneous stuff related to cross-browser eventing and integrates with browser extensions, so I think it would be needlessly confusing to illustrate what we're discussing
What do you mean impossible on mobile? I've been listening to this on a Nexus 5 for 30 mins. It played straight away on Chrome. Continues playing in background tab right now.
I've successfully used a phonegap wrapper (iframe works just fine in the cases I tried) to work around the IOS auto-play and other sound restrictions. Auto play html5 audio elements 'just worked'. This might also be an alternative for whatever restrictions you're dealing with. Of course it's an app not a website, and you still need an IOS device and an apple developer account to build the app, even with 3rd party services like build.phonegap.com.
Aaaaah, the fire has some irregular loud crackling sounds that are fairly distracting! This imaginary beach campfire party of mine isn't an ideal working environment!
I get the feeling this varies greatly from person to person. e.g. If I'm in a coffee shop I pick up fragments of conversation and can't help but try & isolate specific voices. I've tried - I can't block it out. Fragments of conversation to me aren't noise...they're fragmented info requiring more brain power to decipher.
This might just be me though - I think in German, read in English and hear Afrikaans in coffee shops. So I'm all kinds of messed up anyway when it comes to spoken language.
why is it that we sleep better with the sounds of a rainstorm going on?
Because we evolved as animals being preyed upon by large predators, big cats, packs of dogs etc.
When our preyed-upon ancestors heard the sounds of a rainstorm they knew that they could sleep because the predators don't usually hunt during a rainstorm, and that the predators could not smell them during a rainstorm.
Evolutionarily, selection wise speaking, those who slept during a rainstorm got rested and were better rested afterward, and so were more likely to pass on their genes.
Sounds vaguely plausible, but do you have any evidence that substantiates this? In particular, "taking shelter in a rainstorm" seems like a pretty far-fetched survival trait.
understand this--the fingerprint of every major environmental factor can be found in our physiology. Rainstorms are a major environmental factor, and they have been such forever, going back many tens of millions of years. What happens in a rainstorm? Animals hunker down. Why? It is safe to do so for prey animals, and it would be unproductive to do otherwise for predators.
That history is written in our physiology, just as every major environmental factor is written in our physiology.
When I pick up a bug or a leaf or a dog or...any organism, I can see traces of that natural history written onto shape and curve of that organism's body. The dog has sharp teeth, the better to bite its prey, my dear. The leaf has a green skin, the better to turn sunlight into energy, my dear.
Of course the rainstorm has left its mark on your physiology. How could it be otherwise.
And here is the real mindblower--homo sapiens and american society and all parts of it are also part of the natural world. Political talking points and memes are quasi-organic, and their shapes tell you things about their natural history, too. Mind blown?
Gabriel - please add wind. It goes well with the rain/thunder thing. The rain sound track - it sounds realistic, but I think for this specific purpose a bit less emphasis on high frequencies might make it blend into the background better. It sounds a little too hissy. Might just be my sound setup though. I'd also suggest adding a "true" white noise track - I'm guessing much of the tech crowd would love to use that as a baseline and then add specific noises on top.