

World's largest natural sound archive is now online - mhb
http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/Jan13/MacaulayDigital.html

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dhx
The licensing is unfortunately non-free and is therefore incompatible with
free projects such as those operated by the Wikimedia Foundation. It is
however a slight improvement on arXiv. At least terms of use are available in
the footer of each page.

~~~
Alex3917
Basically you just need a license if you want to use the sounds in a movie or
toy or whatever, but they're now free for research and personal use. It might
not be ideal, but it's leaps and bounds better than it used to be.

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keyle
Love it.

One of Australia's best [http://macaulaylibrary.org/audio/152947/dacelo-
novaeguineae-...](http://macaulaylibrary.org/audio/152947/dacelo-novaeguineae-
laughing-kookaburra-australia-new-south-wales-david-stewart)

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Alex3917
I've been giving them shit online for years for not making the archive
publicly accessible. They even responded a couple times defending themselves.
Great to see they finally did it.

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dfc
It looks like the site is built on rails. Unfortunately it looks like they are
either having site issues or there is still a little work to do on the code
base.

[http://macaulaylibrary.org/search?taxon=Odontoceti&taxon...](http://macaulaylibrary.org/search?taxon=Odontoceti&taxon_id=1474599&taxon_rank_id=43&tab=audio)

~~~
hayksaakian
That's a huge red flag. You don't want those logs showing in production.
Someone should notify them.

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ezequiel-garzon
Cornell is an amazing institution considering its effort behind arXiv, this
and I'm sure much more.

Now... why use a link shortener in an HTML page? Sir Berners-Lee would shed a
few tears.

~~~
lbotos
I'm thinking possibly analytics? I know a bunch of people who do that.

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kefsoundnut
Alex3917, MP3 versions of Macaulay archival material have been placed online
over the past 12 years or so, as groups of cataloged items on 1/4" mag tape
have been digitized. So I'm confused about what you mean by "not making the
archive publicly accessible". Word of advice: before giving people "shit",
make sure you aren't full of it! ;-D

The real news is that everything previously cataloged and on tape is now ALL
digitized to 96kHz/24-bit digital audio and on the web as MP3.

You can request 44.1/16 or 96/24 versions of MP3 material you hear on the
Library website. The material is copyrighted, yes, but not priced to make a
lot of money. Contact the library for more info.

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andrewcooke
kind of related, just sharing a happy discovery: a guy called chris watson
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Watson_(musician)> makes recordings of
ambient sounds ("field recordings"). they are less focussed than this archive,
but longer, and available on cd (or via pirate bay etc i imagine).

his site is at <http://www.chriswatson.net/> and you can hear some stuff
there. it's pretty good for going to sleep to (some tracks) or working...

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diego_moita
Very cool. The Vrindavan temple is great for "ambient music":
<http://macaulaylibrary.org/audio/161053>

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antihero
Fucking hell, the site is horrible though.

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politician
Only 16 samples for _Homo sapiens_. Does anyone know if something like this
exists for spoken languages?

~~~
Caligula
Yes but its really expensive and they have almost a monopoly on the vast
quantity of data. They are the linguistic data consortium. Yearly membership
fees for companies is $24000, for non profits(e.g education) is $2400 per
year. Plus it costs extra for the actual data.

<http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/>

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rd108
does anyone know the fastest way to rip a sound file from this flash player
for private use?

~~~
w-ll
Chrome Dev Tools -> Network (or Firebug if you're into that :)

~~~
rd108
Yup. found the file I wanted by looking through the source for *.mp3 and
finding the static file asset.

~~~
freescience
This bookmarklet will add download links. Copy and paste into a bookmark,
click it when you're on an ML search/download page:

javascript:{ try{ titletext=document.getElementById("jqmTitleText");
pat=/([^0-9]+)([0-9]+)/gi; id=pat.exec(titletext.innerHTML)[2];
th=id.substr(0,id.length-4);
url="<http://audio.macaulaylibrary.org/+th+/+id+.mp3>; titletext.innerHTML =
titletext.innerHTML + " <a href=\""+url+"\" target=\"_blank\"
style=\"background-color:#990000;color:white;padding:2px;text-
decoration:none\">download</a>"; }catch(err){} try{
content=document.getElementById("content"); title=content.children[0];
if(title&&!title.children[0]){ pat=/([^0-9]+)([0-9]+)/gi;
id=pat.exec(title.innerHTML)[2]; th=id.substr(0,id.length-4);
url="<http://audio.macaulaylibrary.org/+th+/+id+.mp3>; title.innerHTML =
title.innerHTML + " <a href=\""+url+"\" target=\"_blank\" style=\"background-
color:#990000;color:white;padding:2px;text-decoration:none\">download</a>"; }
}catch(err){} try{ content=document.getElementsByClassName("catalog");
for(c=0;c<content.length;c++){
if(content[c].children[2].classList.contains("play")){
id=content[c].children[0].innerHTML; th=id.substr(0,id.length-4);
url="<http://audio.macaulaylibrary.org/+th+/+id+.mp3>; content[c].innerHTML =
content[c].innerHTML + " <a href=\""+url+"\" target=\"_blank\"
style=\"background-color:#990000;color:white;padding:2px;text-
decoration:none\">download</a>"; } } }catch(err){} }; void(0);

~~~
freerscience
That bookmarklet is wrong. I think hackernews filters out the "s in those
links. Here:

javascript:{ try{ titletext=document.getElementById("jqmTitleText");
pat=/([^0-9]+)([0-9]+)/gi; id=pat.exec(titletext.innerHTML)[2];
th=id.substr(0,id.length-4);
url="htt"+"p:/"+"/audio.macaulaylibrary."+"org/"+th+"/"+id+".mp3";
titletext.innerHTML = titletext.innerHTML + " <a href=\""+url+"\"
target=\"_blank\" style=\"background-
color:#990000;color:white;padding:2px;text-decoration:none\">download</a>";
}catch(err){} try{ content=document.getElementById("content");
title=content.children[0]; if(title&&!title.children[0]){
pat=/([^0-9]+)([0-9]+)/gi; id=pat.exec(title.innerHTML)[2];
th=id.substr(0,id.length-4);
url="ht"+"tp:/"+"/audio.macaulaylibrary."+"org/"+th+"/"+id+".mp3";
title.innerHTML = title.innerHTML + " <a href=\""+url+"\" target=\"_blank\"
style=\"background-color:#990000;color:white;padding:2px;text-
decoration:none\">download</a>"; } }catch(err){} try{
content=document.getElementsByClassName("catalog");
for(c=0;c<content.length;c++){
if(content[c].children[2].classList.contains("play")){
id=content[c].children[0].innerHTML; th=id.substr(0,id.length-4);
url="ht"+"tp:/"+"/audio.macaulaylibrary."+"org/"+th+"/"+id+".mp3";
content[c].innerHTML = content[c].innerHTML + " <a href=\""+url+"\"
target=\"_blank\" style=\"background-
color:#990000;color:white;padding:2px;text-decoration:none\">download</a>"; }
} }catch(err){} }; void(0);

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luciannovo
Is anyone working on an api.

