Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Ambient Mixer, Listen To, Create Ambient Sounds





I recently began to take a closer look at ambient sounds and noise colors, e.g. white noise, to improve my sleep. I personally do not sleep that well which can be mainly attributed to working in front of a computer monitor all day, and to my sensitive hearing. To make matters worse, I live in a place where it is never really quiet. You hear cars, planes and other annoying sounds at night, and school kids, people with dogs and other noises early in the morning.

My basic idea is to overshadow those unpleasant noises and sounds with pleasant ones.

Ambient Mixer now is an online service where users can listen to ambient sound from other users or create their own relaxing sounds. It is free to listen to other user’s sounds, while the creation of custom atmospheric sounds requires an account.

A custom ambient song consists of up to eight different sound samples that you can combine. A click on Load next to each channel opens a menu with sound categories. Included here are effects, nature sounds, transport, human or unreal ambiances to name a few. You usually encounter a number of sub-groups when you select a main group. The nature category for instance is split into the four groups Animals, Musical Instruments, Other, Weather and Water.

ambient mixer

Each channel comes with its own volume control and other settings. It is for instance possible to make a channel random so that its sound loop is only played a specific amount of times per minute, ten minutes or hour.

If there is a downside to the service it is the fact that downloading music to your PC is not free. You have to pay between $5 and $16 depending on the length of the audio that you want.

It is possible to bypass this with sound recorders but it may not be legal in the country you are living in. It is however possible to listen to the songs online. This however is not applicable for me, considering that I do not want to hear my PC running in the background while trying to sleep. While it is almost silent, it is still noticeable.

Users who just want to listen can pick a popular composition on the main page or use the Ambient categories to find something that they like to listen to.

You can check out Ambient Mixer here.

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