20080525Thunderstorm.flac

Yes I know there are plenty of thunderstorm recordings on freesound already, but it is hard to resist recording a good thunderstorm. This is 21 minutes of a good storm we had last night. It starts off with some rain, and the distant sound of Pacific Chorus frogs. Then the thunder begins. Several of the early lightning strikes produced a "pop" in the recording at the moment of the strike. So you can calculate the distance of the strike (from the pop to the thunder). As you can hear, many of the strikes were quite close. At 7:50 the wind kicks up and there is a bit of wind noise until 8:20. At 18:20 a single car passes on the wet street. As the thunder and rain die down, you hear the distant drone of a tug boat pushing a barge down on the river, a couple of miles away. 5/26: I just noticed I named the file with the wrong date - it was recorded on May 24, not May 25. Here is the recording chain: 1. Built-in mics in the Sound Professionals SP-PASM-2 preamp/stereo mic, with the high-sensitivity microphone option. http://www.soundprofessionals.com/cgi-bin/gold/item/SP-PASM-2 2. Sony DCR TRV340 digital8 camcorder, using the audio/video jack. In VCR mode this allows me to record audio (but not video). 3. Windows Media Maker to pull DV-AVI from the camera over the Firewire connection. 4. Cool Edit Pro to extract audio from the AVI.