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Sounds

Chataltul has 39 background sounds in seven groups: cats, rain and water, fire, outside, places, music and noise. One in each group is free (Purring, Rain, Sauna stove, Spring birds, Campus cafeteria, Wandering, and both noises), and the others are in the shop. All of them except brown noise and white noise are real recordings, and they all come from Freesound. Every one is CC0, which means the people who recorded them gave them away to everyone, no strings attached. Nobody has to credit them for that, but I want to, so here's whose each one is.

Cats

Sound The recording By
Purring Female cat purr Sadiquecat
Slow purr Cat purr Trautwein
Deep purr Cat purring cubilon
Sleepy purr purring cat skyn production
Tomasina Cat Purr / gato ronroneando yetcop

Rain and water

Sound The recording By
Rain Light rain in a field of bananas trees felix.blume
Light rain Rain light 2 (rural) jmbphilmes
Heavy rain Heavy Rain Sound - Inu Etc inuetc
Thunderstorm Light rain in a field of bananas trees, with the thunder from Rain and Thunder 4 by FlatHill on top felix.blume
Rainforest Rain Sound and Rainforest INNORECORDS
Stream Gentle Stream Natural Stream Sound BurghRecords
Waves Wave on the beach in Thailand, at 20 meters form the water, during the night felix.blume
Big waves Big waves hit land straget
Baltic beach Waves at Baltic Sea shore pulswelle
Ocean Ocean Waves Noted451

Fire

Sound The recording By
Sauna stove Lit Fireplace lurpsis
Fireplace Fireplace for Six Minutes (Stereo) petebuchwald
Crackling fire fireplace martats
Hearth 13_Fire in fireplace 16FThumaF
Fire in a big room Silencyo_CC_Fire in Fireplace_Close Up_Reverberant2 silencyo

Outside

Sound The recording By
Spring birds Spring Birds Loop with Low-Cut (New Jersey) hargissssound
Birds Bird ambience. Coniferous forest dawn chorus. SamsterBirdies
Birdsong Birds Singing 03 DCPoke
Night Night Ambience 01 - Aug 2 2013 - Back Yard rgbrobot
Crickets crickets FreethinkerAnon
Crickets and a far storm Crickets At Night - Raw sound Defelozedd94
Wind Howling winter storm ambient sounds, mixed from DBlover's own recording and five more CC0 ones, by Jeffreys2 (one, two), felix.blume, krnd and courter DBlover
Hollow wind wind sleepCircle

Places

Sound The recording By
Campus cafeteria Crowd at Cafeteria sonically_sound
Café Restaurant Atmosphere (crowded) felix.blume
Copenhagen café People talking at cafe ambience priesjensen
City at night Night city atmosphere Soundkrampf

Music

Sound The recording By
Wandering Wandering Andrewkn
Dunes Dunes Andrewkn
Angelic pad Angelic Pad Loop PhonZz
Singing bowls sing bowl wave bird relaxtion meditation music smilecat77
Tibetan bowl Relaxation Sound Kevin_Manickam

The meows

When a kitten comes home at the end of a block, it says hello with one of these (unless the chime is off in Settings):

Four of them are by felix.blume (Rain, Café, Waves, and the rain under the Thunderstorm), and his page on Freesound has lots more like them, if you like these.

For Birds I wanted a quiet garden in the morning, but every garden recording I tried had something in it that would stand out every time the loop came round (a pheasant, a rooster, a plane), so it's a forest at dawn instead. The Thunderstorm is two recordings together: "Rain and Thunder 4" on its own is only 33 seconds, one roll of thunder and then the rain fading out, so its thunder rolls over a longer stretch of Felix Blume's rain.

How they're made

Each one is a stretch of the recording, from 9 seconds (Tomasina) to two minutes (the music), with its end blended into its start so it loops without a seam. For the purrs, the blend sits in the little pause between two breaths. They're all set to about the same loudness (the fires with lots of loud pops a bit quieter), so switching sounds doesn't make you jump. They're MP3s, from a fifth of a megabyte to two, and one only downloads the first time you pick it. Until it's there, or if you're offline, Chataltul plays a version of something like it that it makes on the device, and the recording fades in once it arrives. The music has nothing like it, so it just starts when it's there.

tools/fetch-sounds.py makes them, and the picks are listed in it: which recording, where in it the loop starts and how long it is. So anyone can make them again, or swap one for another recording. Developing Chataltul has the rest of how the code works.

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