Yesterday I posted an MP3 that I use to give me ambient noise. The audio is the sound of a brook. Evidently brook sounds are very popular. Here is what my outgoing traffic looked like for the past few days.
The blue line is my outgoing traffic, which suddenly jumped when it was posted. It looks like a couple thousand people downloaded the file. If you were one of the ones who downloaded it, please give me some feedback on whether it was useful or not. I’ve got a few other ones with different sounds that I’m thinking about releasing and I’d like to know what was good or bad about the way this one worked.
If you didn’t download it and want to check it out, the link is in the bottom of the RSS feed. You can get it by subscribing to the email feed or using and RSS reader.
I suggest deleting the last few seconds of empty air.
I have another sample that I use for ambient noise (rain). I made two copies of the sample. I make Windows Media Player play each sample continuously with cross-fading set to one second of overlap. The cross-fading blurs where one sample ends and the other begins. I don’t hear the lack of sound (which can be as distracting as the sounds I’m trying to block out) as media player switches tracks.
I have enjoyed the brook sounds although I find I have to play them very softly. I listen through headphones. I would be interested in more files.
Mark, thanks for the sound. It’s very soothing and gives some ambient white noise. I was a little distracted with the gap of silence Winamp puts in when playing in a loop. I did a little research and found that if I change it to ogg format it comes out “gapless.” Also there are Winamp plug-ins that make an MP3 play continuously too.
Like Conibear, I enjoyed the brook sounds but at a low volume. Too loud makes me have to go to the bathroom. :) I’d love to hear more.
There was a gap at the end that I’m not sure how it got there. I’ve made a change and it should be gone now. I’m considering making longer version (20 to 40 minutes) to help solve the gap problem.
I’m not familiar with WMP’s cross fade option, but you could cover the gap by playing two samples at the same time, but offset by a few seconds.
Mark,
Is the traffic graph measure bandwidth, or number of accesses to the blog itself?
If it is measure bytes transferred, the graph may not necessarily show that more people than normal are engaging — just that they’re downloading audio instead of text, causing a spike in bandwidth.
FWIW.
:-)
@Nick – You are correct it is bandwidth which is what I meant by traffic. I guess some people might interpret traffic to refer to the number of people. Coming from a networking background I meant bandwidth. :)
There are other charts that show the actual Apache hits. I didn’t mean to imply that I suddenly had a 10,000 times the visitors to the site. :) Overall visitors is climbing, but not on that scale. I was just impressed how many people downloaded the file. Whenever I put something up like that, I always wonder “will anyone besides me find this interesting?” So it felt good to see the spike.
I loved the file, and thanks for posting it. I sit far too close to someone who has conversations that I really care not to listen to. While I can still hear the sound of her voice while I’m listening to the file, I can drown out the content… it’s perfect.
Yes, it is a cool MP3, wich just relaxes me in my office. If you have more of that kind of MP3s… i’d love to hear them. I used to listen to Jazz, but “water” is way better ;)
Erik
The irony is that I had just brought to my office that morning one of those small homedic waterfalls to sit on my desk. When I plugged it in I was disappointed in how quiet it was. As we now know who needs a “waterfall” when you can have a stream running on a 2.1 speaker system.
Hmm I like the sound but for one thing.. Because I work (in my day job) with media and streaming, I find myself noticing all the mpeg audio artifacts in it. Maybe I should go sample a brook at a higher bitrate, as that will avoid the clipping and quality things.
In principle it is definitely a good idea.