Urban Winds II

Urban Winds II gets you 65 minutes (2 GB) of medium and high-wind sounds in 29 separate files – recorded in 24bit/96kHz M/S stereo (decoded to X/Y stereo and mono), using Sennheiser MKH micophones. All files are UCS-compliant.

You get empty streets and alleys, office exteriors and a marina. You get steel wires that whistle and whip in the wind, pipes and cavities resonating in the gusts. You get ambiances and a few specifics. I have tried to strike the balance between variety and nuance, to give you sound pros something to build a scene around. In that sense, this really is a construction kit of sorts. This collection picks off where Urban Winds left off.

You will hear very little human activity – other than distant traffic. I recorded mostly at night, and in large, undisturbed areas.

In some of the recordings, you will hear wind buffeting – more of the windscreen than the microphones – but there is some. In some cases, I opted to tame the most violent events, but others I left in. In many cases, wind noise reduction simply took away too much of the forcefulness, so I left it as is.

Some specifics appear in both mono and stereo versions, where the stereo version are X/Y derived from the M/S source files and the mono versions are simply the Mid channel. I did this, because most people seem to prefer X/Y files for post-work, rather than M/S – but a down-mix of X/Y to mono would be inferior to using the original Mid-mic signal. All sounds were captured in Aarhus, Denmark.