Ambient Sounds

Platforms

About


The Ambient Sounds skill is a "quick and dirty" interface to freesound.org that is home to hundreds of thousands of sound samples. If you are an audio file, please support them (and if you find my experiments like this skill cool, click on the Patreon button to the right and support me paying for hosting and development costs.)

The skill hooks up to their amazing database of sound and adds up to 15 random-ish selections to your Cortana playlist.  Try invocations like...

  • Hey Cortana, ask ambient sounds crickets
  • Hey Cortana, ask ambient sounds dogs barking
  • Hey Cortana, ask ambient sounds cats purring
  • Hey Cortana, ask ambient sounds Amazon bird songs
You can also say 'help' or use built in sound controls (like 'stop', 'pause', and 'resume'.)

Invoke and Windows don't work the same for the playlist. On Windows, all sounds added to the playlist will play back to back. On Invoke, it seems to only play the first sound.  To work around this, I added the 'next' command to get the next sound on the play list (so you do not need to re-query.) However, using next on Windows does not re-queue up the rest of the sounds (so if you use next to skip a sound, you will need to say it again to play the next sound.)

The skill is a work in progress.  If it is adopted, I'll invest in making it a comprehensive playlist manager and fully exploit the freesound search API.  (There are cool things in there, like sounds like.)

And be warned that not all the sounds there are G-rated.  I've added a bad word filter, but it won't catch everything. Offensive sounds shouldn't be on freesound - so if you are offended - complain to them. Also, I believe in the reddit mantra of content policing - it is up to the community to police its content - not the platform. 

Also, if you use freesound, I only return Commons licensed sounds that do not require attribution that are between 1 minute and 3 minutes in length.


3 comments:

  1. Hey great work!, much needed on the cortana platform!. I was looking for fan sounds. Now it would be nice if I could loop them with gapless playback? is that even possible on this platform? thank a lot.

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    Replies
    1. Thanks for the comment! Loop back today is possible - but its a total hack - and likely not seemless - or it is a ton of work (that could be expensive). For example, I could send a short sample repeatedly with a delay the length of the sample. Or, I could set up media services where I would buffer the sample and then just continually live stream it.

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  2. I hate this format, I don't need 500 different rain storm sound playlist, I want jus 1 rain storm sound

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