Thunderstorm - Rain On Concrete - 10 mins

Updated version here: http://freesound.org/people/naturenutt/sounds/348231/

Thunderstorm and rain on concrete recorded from my front porch in May 2015. Just a touch of wind blowing the rain around, but not much. Used a Marantz PMD661 recorder and Sony ECM MS957 stereo mic. Recorded at 24/96 originally, stepped down to 16/44 and mp3'd at 320kbps. It's 10 mins 34 secs long. The download sounds much better than playback above - no anti-aliasing racket and all freq's above 11kHz are there. (Freesound chops everything off above 11kHz, like the sample above, probably for bandwidth reasons I imagine.)

Technical Info:

Prep'd using K-20 levels (just a fancy way of saying I kept the loudest average levels at -20dB (roughly RMS, more often LUFS now), kept mono and stereo images at same volume levels, and made sure freq's over 4kHz kept a -6dB tilt between numeric octaves. Newer music and such these days leans towards -3dB tilts, but I guess I just prefer -6, sounds smoother to me. Works good with any nature sounds doing this, at least to my ears (just my own opinion, of course). Used IQ4Gui (free plugin) to keep mono & stereo images balanced, but I let mono sounds (ie, thunder) fluctuate without clamping down on them. The rain was steady enough that I didn't have to balance it's mono & stereo signal very much at all.

If you like recording & processing your own nature sounds, here's some helpful info about the newer loudness acronyms a lot of DAWS are now using: http://www.tcelectronic.com/loudness/loudness-explained/
http://productionadvice.co.uk/lufs-dbfs-rms/
And, if you're interested, some info about Bob Katz's K-System and how it works:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-system
https://www.gearslutz.com/board/mastering-forum/648559-bob-katzs-k-system-nuts-n-bolts.html
I use a lot of this stuff with multi-track music recording, mixing, and mastering. As always, use what works for you, throw out the rest.