matteason

Messing around with SDR is a really fun little hobby. There's something very satisfying about picking up signals that are just floating around waiting to be seen.

I briefly tried writing an SDR tuner in JavaScript a while back but there was a bug somewhere between Chrome and my SDR dongle that meant it failed whenever you tried to tune to a different frequency. I might pick it back up and see if it's possible now.

If you're interested in near-realtime weather images without having to fiddle with SDR, NASA collate images from loads of different satellites at https://worldview.earthdata.nasa.gov/ and so do EUMETSAT at https://view.eumetsat.int/productviewer?v=default#

I used the EUMETSAT data to build this service which provides 3-hourly cloud maps for the whole Earth, which are surprisingly difficult to find: https://github.com/matteason/live-cloud-maps

Thanks! There's a credits link in the footer which lists out all the authors of the sounds (mostly from freesound.org and the Free Music Archive under CC-BY or CC0 licenses). For the music I dig through stuff tagged ambient. I'd like to expand the music selection a lot more, and maybe have something radio-y too

The binaural beats I made for someone who asked for them in these comments and the shipping forecast is one track of me reading a made-up (but structurally accurate, I think) forecast in my best Radio 4 voice :)

And all the while Horizon is still in use and still making money vanish - via both bugs and the £95 million paid to Fujitsu to keep it going for another two years: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-67940125

Thank you! And in case anyone is suspicious I promise this isn't my alt :)

Glad the gamma worked for you. I'd never really used binaural beats before but there seem to be a lot of things claiming to be binaural beats (especially on YouTube) that are actually just relaxing music? So I made them from scratch to make sure they're accurate

Good suggestion. It's on the plan to add more control over individual channels (things like positioning in 3D space, high-pass/low-pass, reverb etc) so a 'drift' mode would fit nicely in there

Thanks! Both in the works now and nearly ready to go

I have considered adding a subscription tier called Ambiphone Minus which gets you absolutely nothing extra and may even take features away

Thank you! I'm glad you like the design, I wasn't sure how it would go down

There is but it only shows after about a second so that it doesn't flash up unnecessarily if the sound loads quickly

Coming very soon alongside saved mixes!

My 10 year old daughter did this when I asked her to test it, it's surprisingly not as awful as I thought it would be

The test version at https://test.ambiph.one is a PWA if you want to try it!

Yeah, once I've implemented saved mixes prioritising those sounds would be good too

Yep - all generated manually in Adobe Audition just now so they're properly done

OK, they're there. There's a new 'Binaural beats' section near the bottom.

I'm adding some now, just for you. Give me an hour or two. (They'll be properly made, pure tones hard panned left and right)

Ha, I'm building up a nice little following of tinnitus-havers. Glad it works for you!

One thing I forgot to mention - I'm going to start sending out email updates soon so if anyone would like to keep up to date on new features and sounds please fill in this form: https://forms.gle/D1BxTx21QUHdpBp17 (put any old nonsense in the feedback field if you don't have any feedback)

This is in development at the moment and very close to being launched - watch this space

That's really kind, thank you. It's definitely been a slog getting it working consistently across every browser/device combo so I'm glad that effort's paid off.

On the music point - at the moment it's just using looped versions of some (great) free tracks I've found, but I'm experimenting with generative music at the moment, including using environmental stimuli (mic, light level, accelerometer etc) to trigger changes in the music and bring in live samples from your surroundings. Early days but it's been fun to experiment with.

This is actually in testing at the moment! I'd love to hear any feedback you have if you fancy testing it out, it's installable from https://test.ambiph.one

I have actually had some lovely feedback from people who have said it's helped with their tinnitus (amongst them, unexpectedly, X-Press 2 of 90s dance music fame, as well as lots of other DJs)

It's definitely going to vary from person to person so if anyone else has any suggestions of the types of noise that might help them I'm all ears. I'm also thinking of adding more controls to individual sounds so you might be able to control, for example, the exact pitch of the 'bass rumble' sound, which may help people zero in on the frequency that helps mask their tinnitus

That's really interesting, I'll check yours out.

Yeah it has been painful. It took a lot of trial and error to get it working consistently across browsers, from absolute basics like getting gapless looping audio working consistently across browsers to maintaining playback while the screen's off to iOS treating background audio differently in PWAs vs Safari. I've managed to get it in a fairly hack-free state now but I am definitely worried about browsers shifting underneath me and breaking things in the future. Best of luck with your app too!

Offhand do you know what the copyright status of ATC recordings is? The Apollo recordings are public domain because they're US government works

It's not out of the question at all, I just need to figure out how to combine the sounds server-side and stream them out. On the plus side it should then be pretty simple to make work across different smart speakers, I'm just not sure how complex/expensive it would be to get set up

Thanks, you're the first to spot that!

You're welcome or I'm sorry, depending on where you are

Great suggestion. I'm testing a PWA version at the moment (https://test.ambiph.one) and PWAs do allow offline caching of resources but I'm not sure if I'll bump up against any cache size limits. I seem to remember reading that Safari is particularly stingy unfortunately.

Ha! I've always said am-BEE-fone but am-BIH-fon-EE is now the official alternative pronounciation

On it! The Apollo 11 audio is all on archive.org [0] so I'll get some samples from that added

https://archive.org/details/Apollo11Audio