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Home Environments & Ambiences Page 40
Environment recordings, ambiences and soundscapes – from all over the world, and beyond
Suburbs of Chicago: Forest Preserve is the third in the Suburbs of Chicago series. Included you will hear bird chirps, tree rustles, bike passes, distant chatter, a small brook and more! This pack consists of 17 audio files, all metadata tagged and updated using the Universal Category System in Soundminer, Basehead, and Soundly. Recorded at 24 bit, 192 kHz using the Sennheiser MKH8050 and MKH30 into a Sound Devices Mix Pre-6. Over 2 hours of recordings! Like in the other packs in this series, you will always hear distant traffic and planes, along with an overhead view of a semi busy highway cutting right through the forest preserve.
An library of elevators! From your standard elevator to EWP, platform elevator, large industrial lifts, one of the largest elevators in Europe and an old elevator from the early 1900s. Hear them pass by, listen to room tones, button presses, door movements and more! Everything recorded in Stereo, 96 kHz 24 Bits with Neumann KM184, DPA 4017 and Sennheiser MKH50 on a Sound Devices 633. Total 46 files in 625 Mb.
• In Northern Rockies: Miniature, get a mini-nature collection of ambiences from the mountains of Montana. Hear hallowed halls carved by glacial sculptors. Hear quaking Aspens and Ruffed grouse drumming on hollow logs. Hear euphoric dawn choruses, merry songbirds, sacred stillness, and stately woodpeckers knocking on forest doors. This library gives you a small collection of both “quiet” and “active” nature sounds from the continental divide of North America.
• Only 26 glaciers (of the 150 in 1850) remain in Glacier National Park and all are predicted to melt within 30 years. Hear the sounds of this stunning natural cathedral while the glaciers remain. The ecosystem won’t sound the same when they’re gone.
2% FOR THE ENVIRONMENT & CARBON NEUTRAL:
• Two percent of the price of this library is donated to an environmental cause. I view it as an “artist royalty” for the planet!
• Carbon offset credits were purchased for the Northern Rockies Series. Field Recording travel for this library was carbon neutral!
From the snow-covered slopes of Mammoth mountain, to the ice-filled shores of Duluth, Minnesota, this library brings together some terrific subzero sounds for your next snow-themed project. With ski and snowboard bys, chairlifts, cold winds, and even melting icicles, this is surely a collection you don't want to miss. Recorded with the stunning Sennheiser Ambeo microphone, each ambience is delivered in both AmbiX and FuMa formats, as well as Stereo, 5.1, and 7.1.
What’s more- a 360 video reference is provided to offer a fully immersive image of the sound effect being captured!
Home to biggest fashion houses and supermodels, Milan is one of the most entertaining cities in Italy. On the contrary, it’s a secular city that has one of the biggest Gothic cathedrals in the world – the Duomo. Extensive public transport (trams, buses, metro, scooters), canal system and people give this city unique soundscapes. Apart from Milan you will also experience a journey to Lake Como, an upscale resort area know for its dramatic scenery and celebrity homes.
An underground parking is a place where you don’t feel safe. A squeaky door, a car in approach or simply someone playing with keys. Once again you will have a lot of possibility with those surround sounds for creating space and depth.
Variety 2 is our second bundle of popular, mixed sound clips. This collection packs 150 specific and ambient sound effects into just over 2 gigabytes of audio.
It features multiple categories of fx, ranging from alarms to horns, rain to voices, knives and fireworks. You'll find sirens and race cars, trains and thunder, and much more.
Recorded using only bird calls, musical instruments, voice and whistling techniques, IMAGINARY BIRDS contains over 200 different organic and realistic songs of non-existing birds. Recorded with a Sennheiser MKH 8050 with ultrasonic content, you can use the sounds as is, pitch-shift them or combine individual sounds to create new bird songs.
• 227 sounds recorded with MKH 8050
• 96KHz/24bit
• Each file contains several variations of the songs
• Recorded dry, no reverb added
• Ideal for cartoon, sci-fi, adventure films, video games, creature design, soundscapes…
A meticulously crafted sound library that offers a plethora of workplace ambiences and sounds, transporting your audience to bustling offices, serene lobbies, humming server rooms, and much more. Immerse your audience in the essence of bustling urban workspaces.
Whistling, fluttering and buffeting wind recorded indoors
Interior wind is a collection of pitched tonal howls, steady breezes and dynamic powerful gusts in stereo and surround. It’s full of whistling, fluttering and buffeting wind recorded indoors. It has more than 3 hours of indoor wind ambiences from houses, apartments, cabins, halls and a car. All files are thoroughly and carefully tagged with metadata and have UCS-compliant file naming.
The library is a great addition to Wind Ambiences.
Characterful wind without man-made sound or birds
It’s a collection of wind from an inside perspective made with years of patience waiting for the right storms to come along while finding different locations with their own character.
Pure singing wind and creaking houses
Mostly recorded at night during the cold winter, the sounds are isolated wind through cracks, crevices, wind shafts and slightly open doors or windows. Some with the structure creaking and moving, others just howling tones. Others are the powerful sound of wind pushing against the wall or roof, adding pressure and buffeting.
Great variety and many locations
One of the locations we went to was in a house placed under a 120 meter (394 feet) tall power line. The power lines would resonate with a very low and ominous howl while the pylon would emit a specific note when the wind came from the right direction. Another recording session was done in a small wooden cabin in rural Denmark with all walls moving, creaking and making cracking sounds. Others were recorded in apartments or more traditional houses in rooms and attics.
Getting control of the wind
We would look at the wind direction and open windows and doors on the other side of the house to stimulate air flow and record through the tiny cracks. This way we got some control and could play with the tones and force of the wind.
Recording techniques
The surround files were recorded with an IRT Cross in surround while the stereo files range from XY to ORTF depending on the source.
Everything was recorded with MKH50 microphones on a Sound Devices 744T.
Close, Medium and Distant recordings
The collection has variation in distance to capture both the creaks and movement in the room while others are recorded in closer proximity to isolate a detailed howl or whistle.
UCS naming and metadata
We have given careful consideration to the file naming and metadata of the collection, keeping filenames short and concise while providing extra information in the metadata to help narrow search criteria.
• Quad IRT Cross and Stereo ORTF
• 96 kHz / 24 Bit
• 42 files with an average length of 4,5 minutes
• More than 3 hours of material
• Detailed metadata and file naming
Underwater recordings of the sea recorded with one or two hydrophones.
Geophony and anthrophony underwater sounds: sounds of the waves, shallows, deep sea, port, harbour, diving, ship, sea traffic and other. Underwater ambiences and textures.
Note that the background crackling of the sea is present in the majority of the recordings.
All recordings are recorded with Aquarian audio H2-a XLR hydrophones and Sound Devices field mixer (preamps are Lundahl input transformers for warmth of the sound). Special suspension for the hydrophones is used to avoid (handling) rumble. For “stereo” recordings hydrophones were spaced 1m apart to get some time difference (or Depth of field). There is a mono recordings recorded with one hydrophone too.
Max peak level is around -5dBFS. No compressors or dynamic tools were used in editing.
The Shopping Carts SFX Library contains a wide variety of professional shopping cart sound effect recordings. These include rolls, crashes, drops, stutters, basket seat movements, skids, shakes, and more.
Wind Textures III highlights a new palette of wide sounding wind effects recorded over two years, from high mountain ridges to marshes and grasslands.
Garden and nature in April and August. Fresh spring air with birds’ concert in the morning, crickets and summer ambiences,echoey chatter from the neighborhood, gardening, dogs barking, roosters calling, jets and prop passing, as well as the dead silence and eerie animals in the deep of the night; the awakening of nature and residents during the early morning hours and much more.
‘Residential Forest I + II’ are the two libraries of long term recordings in a German allotment environment in one. The area is a remote place surrounded by a forest with cottages, ponds and lots of nature sounds. The library is a conflation of suburban, residential and forest ambiences.
‘Residential Forest I + II’ contains 85 unique ambiences, recorded in Germany during summer, August 2021 and spring, in April 2022 from. Out of 40 hours of ambiences I edited the best parts and collected them to a 9 GB time travel in sound, from afternoon to evening, through the night, morning and mid day hours in a residential forest area.
For recording as well the dead silence during the night I chose an extreme low noise matched pair of Rode NT 1A and the Tascam HD-P1.
The whole length of the library is about 9 hours, most of the ambiences are between 5 – 10 minutes, some are longer, a few are shorter.
‘Residential Forest II’ is recorded in AB Stereophony, 48 kHz, 24 bit.
Hospital Ambiance is 59 minutes/1.80 Gb of ambiance recordings from an old hospital. 24 separate files – recorded in 24bit/96kHz A-B stereo. All sounds are UCS-compatible.
Hospital Ambiance was recorded in the rooms and corridors of the old (now defunct) Aarhus County Hospital in Aarhus, Denmark. A prominent feature is the lack of acoustical treatment in corridors and hallways, giving a rather hard and reverberant sound, which is typical of Danish public building styles of the 1930’s and 40’s.
Elevators and automatic doors are heavy and noisy; humming and clanking as patients and staff pass through them. Electric vehicles used to move patients and supplies around inside the complex are old and not exactly noiseless either. Finally, while I did not have access to operating rooms or the like, I did get into a couple of basement corridors, where there were less people and more Hvac noise (yay!).
In some of the recordings, faint, muffled or smeared voices can be heard. While I have removed passages with distinctly Danish words (which might also be connected with specific, recognizable persons), there is still a certain tone and pitch to the Danish language, which may come through on occasion.
All in all, this is the sound of a place that is no more, as this old hospital is being turned into expensive apartments or something to that effect.
Australian Lakes: Active Nature is a collection of recordings made around Lake Nuga Nuga, in the remote Central Highlands Region of Queensland. Recorded over several days after having recently rained, the area was alive with active vibrant birdlife and insects. Several recordings were done using dual microphone setups, with stereo and shotgun mics used to capture both a wide stereo atmosphere and a focused mono, close perspective on the birds. These recordings are phase aligned so can be used in LCR if desired, however are provided as a seperate mono and stereo file. Ranging from pre-dawn to evening, all recordings are meticulously mastered with sound designers and FX editors in mind, including extensive UCS metadata and species identified where possible. A separate folder includes several individual bird calls, some removed and mastered from the longer recordings, and some as standalone where a longer atmosphere wasn’t desirable. Identified bird species include:
NASCAR – car race. Recorded in NOS stereo and MS stereo.
Clean recordings without any crowd (except few files), air traffic, birds…
Recorded with Sound Devices 744T/Mix Pre recorder, Sennheiser MKH mics, Rode NT1 (matched pair) mics, Rycote blimps (windjammers). Tripod used, recorded from hand-following the object (check sound list for info).
Recorded on Grand prix circuit. Long recordings. Metadata tagged with detailed description of equipment and object of recording.
RAW files, without any eq., and dynamic manipulation (compressors/limiters etc.). Maximum peak level is -5 dBFS .
Fully UCS compliant
From gentle wispy winds recorded in rushes to gale force winds bending branches.
All sounds were recorded during a trip home to Ireland.
Check out the video below to see some of the recording session.
Equipment:
LOM Usi Pros
Sound Devices MixPre-3II
A comprehensive collection of recordings from India. Covering rural atmospheres, birdlife, city traffic and village life plus many more.
During these last months we have recorded several Ambisonic room tones. This is a small selection of the best Room tones In IMMERSIVE format!
We choose ambisonic for our libraries as the most adaptive format in Audio Postproduction. We serve the edited and mastered AMBIX files, and decoded surround format in Dolby ATMOS, 5.1 and ST .
We recorded around 29 beautiful tracks in ambisonic format, 48Khz and 24 bits HD. As always, top quality recordings specially designed for film audio projects.
All our libraries are UCS compliant (universalcategorysystem.com). In this new category system all files contain extensive metadata like file description, Category & Subcategory. Metadata can be read and processed by the most common audio libraries management tools . Starting with Full support from Soundminer and more audio tools adopting this system, we are adopting metadata UCS system in our files!
Japan: Bullet Trains is a collection of exterior recordings and interior ambiences of a variety of Japanese bullet trains which includes passbys, arrivals, idles, departures and ride ambiences.
The shinkansen, or bullet train, is a symbol of Japan’s economic and technological prowess. Streaking by at speeds of up to 200mph, their sound pierces over miles of empty farmland. In rare spots where you can get near the tracks, the air pressure bursts of these trains passing by can knock you off-balance.
Recording coverage between models vary quite a bit, so please check the tracklist to get a sense of what is available per bullet train model.
Note: The W7 series bullet trains were recorded within their first month entering service, well before they had time to wear-in.
Models represented in this collection:
(Dates indicate the service years for the model, not the specific age of the train recorded)
These recordings were originally part of the Japan Sound Effects Collection Kickstarter campaign that was successfully funded in 2015.
All recordings have meticulously written Soundminer metadata embedded in them and comply with Universal Category System naming standards. Included in the download folder is also an excel file and CSV file with all of the metadata fields.
Equipment Used: Tascam HD-P2 | Rode NT4 | Rode NTG3
Public Spaces France is a library of high quality backgrounds, sweeteners and walla, all recorded over several years on the city streets of France.
Cafe culture, city nightlife, metro lines, rooftops, alleyways, markets, parks and town squares; the library captures a wide range of city environments at varying times of day and season.
Real French walla with discernible speech removed, creating flexible recordings that can fit a wide range of projects.
With recordings from Paris, Toulouse and Annecy, this library offers new environments, carefully selected for their quality and utility in post production.
Mid-/Side-Stereo ambiences of the German city and seaport Hamburg.
Different situations recorded in the downtown with people and traffic and the famous red light district “Reeperbahn”.
Also included are recordings of a shipyard and on a ferry.
All files are carefully edited and comes with detailed metadata. Ready to use left/right decodings are also included.
Electromagnetic Design Vol. 2 contains a diverse collection of experimental ambiences gathered from a variety of sources around an Electrical Power Plant and a radio tower.
Using both condenser microphones and an electromagnetic receiver, our Audio Craftsmen captured material ranging from fences & metal coverings surrounding the power plant, to wires, generators & pylons. Our team then meticulously edited and designed these sounds, including a range of characteristics such as screaming interference, distorted glitches, sweeping electrical currents and much more to create an eclectic assortment of short ambiences. Perfect for building nerve racking intensity within your sound design in Sci-Fi, Horror or Dramatic film, game, or television projects. All files are available in 24bit 96kHz allowing further sonic manipulation, tagged with extensive metadata and are UCS compliant for ease of workflow.
With A Sound Effect, Asbjoern has created a web site where our international community can browse, learn, and share the vast fruits of our labors. Together we are accelerating the very real potential power of sound design as a recognized art form.
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