Freesound Forums

I've been looking for a few ambient noise sounds (airport, etc), but nothing here really does want I wanted. So if I ever get the free time (ha...), I was planning on going down to the local regional airport with my laptop and sony mic and recording some noise.

A few questions, from all over the spectrum...

1) What kind of mics are useful for this? I have a sony ecm-ms907, which seems to not suck horribly. Is that adequate?

2) What is the copyright situation on creating field recordings? Do i need permission from anyone who happens to get caught in the recording radius? I'm in Canada, if that affects my copyright laws.

3) What is the max file size / sound length that's useful to upload here? I was planning on using the sound as general atmosphere for something, so i was looking at between 10-30min of noise. Is that excessive?

Thanks

Hi Therac - welcome.

I can only answer one of them - and thats the first. The main general motto of the freesound forums is some noise is better than no noise. So it doesn't matter that your mic is not as good as you can get - but its better than nothing. I think as well that as for time, you can upload as much as you can get away with (without being arrested for being weird )

Welcome to Freesound!

As to your other questions...

2) I am not a lawyer, but I think you'd only need someone's permission if they are recognizeable in the recording, I.E. talking (not just in the background noise), singing, etc. For just people walking past I don't think it's neccessary.

3) I don't think there are any limits per se (correct me if I'm wrong). If you think someone will get more out of a 30 minute sample than a 10 minute one (lots of stuff happening, different sounds, etc.) go for it. For such a long sample I would recommend compressing it, FLAC is a good choice since it's lossless.

I've just uploaded two recordings made in airports, an ambient sound in a hall and an announcement. (I left them out before because they were made with my digital voice recorder, so the quality might not be good enough.) I have some more recordings like this also from other airports and from train stations (these are with better quality) but none that are 10 minutes long I'm afraid. Maybe acombination of several files is possible?

there's some 60 minute files on freesound.
it's ok, we can handle it.

- bram

Just uploaded a 15min .flac I recorded over lunch.

Used a thinkpad with a Sony ECM-MS907. I did have the laptop amplifying it, despite the fact it's a powered mic.

It came out okay, after the noise removal.