Tag: Music

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NASA Space Sounds for EXS-24

I saw that NASA released a load of audio clips from various historic space missions – from Sputnik to the final flight of Atlantis, via the moon! Space sounds have long been used musical contexts – SpaceOddity, Telstar, Pulsar, Lemon Jelly’s “Space Walk” to name but a few. I felt I had to make these more musically useful that the ‘ringtone’ MP3s available on NASA’s site, so I wrapped them up as a library for the EXS-24 sampler (appears in Apple’s Logic and Logic Express DAWs). The sounds will work straight away in Logic, but the sounds are accessible in the archive as AIFF files so you can easily convert them to other formats. I split up the sounds into the same historical categories as on the NASA site so you’re not loading up all the samples at once. Keyboard mapping isn’t anything particular (white notes starting at C1), but I did clean up the samples a little and edited down some shorter clips of the more familiar or musical sounds (“Houston, we have a problem”, “The Eagle has landed”, “That’s one small step” etc).

The original sounds are mostly mono with low bandwidth, resolution and sample rate, but many are supplied as stereo 44.1KHz 16-bit files, so I’ve converted them all to that as EXS-24 doesn’t seem to like mixing sample rates in one instrument.

So, go ahead and download the NASA sample library! (70Mb zip)

Obviously I have no rights to these samples; NASA is encouraging people to download and use them at will, and I assume it’s being published under their open-source license.

I wrote this entry a while ago but forgot to post it, duh.

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Speaker & room calibration

I was lucky enough to pick up a Behringer Ultracurve Pro DSP8024 for a mere £50 on eBay recently. It turned out to have a buggy OS version (1.2), and Behringer very kindly sent me a replacement EPROM with a new 1.3 OS on it, which works just fine. I now have it installed between my Soundcraft mixer and my Wharfedale active monitors. I used its “Auto-Q” calibration routine and put up with some quite loud pink noise to calculate a room correction curve. Because it knows the spectrum it’s generating, it assumes that what it gets back has been altered by the combination of speakers, room and microphone, so it can calculate an eq map to compensate for it. It’s quite fun to watch as it has a nice big LCD screen to display the 31 1/3 octave bands – the initial spectrum is fairly peaky, but as it iteratively applies corrections you see (and hear) it flattening out. It’s also very obvious that my monitors don’t put out much below 50Hz (it analyses down to 20Hz), but that’s to be expected from a moderately sized box with a 6.5″ driver. The results are really pretty good, sounds lovely and smooth, but the real surprise is when you’ve been listening to it for a while and you switch out the EQ – it’s really quite a shock to hear the uncorrected version. Lots of purists don’t like room correction by EQ, saying it’s better to fix the room in the first place, and also that EQ calculated like this is highly dependent on the listening position (which it is). I have a lots of bookshelves facing my speakers; they make fantastic diffusers, and I have some Universal Acoustics absorber tiles on the sloping ceiling above my listening position. The longest room mode will be fairly undamped (I’m not about to start hanging duvets around the walls!), but the resulting EQ is below 6db in either direction across the whole range – I’ve heard of rooms with 24db peaks! Anyway, after all that, it sounds lovely, and I’m happy!