Ambient Mixer, Listen To, Create Ambient Sounds
I recently began to take a closer look at ambient sounds and noise colors, e.g. white noise, to improve my sleep. I personally do not sleep that well which can be mainly attributed to working in front of a computer monitor all day, and to my sensitive hearing. To make matters worse, I live in a place where it is never really quiet. You hear cars, planes and other annoying sounds at night, and school kids, people with dogs and other noises early in the morning.
My basic idea is to overshadow those unpleasant noises and sounds with pleasant ones.
Ambient Mixer now is an online service where users can listen to ambient sound from other users or create their own relaxing sounds. It is free to listen to other user's sounds, while the creation of custom atmospheric sounds requires an account.
A custom ambient song consists of up to eight different sound samples that you can combine. A click on Load next to each channel opens a menu with sound categories. Included here are effects, nature sounds, transport, human or unreal ambiances to name a few. You usually encounter a number of sub-groups when you select a main group. The nature category for instance is split into the four groups Animals, Musical Instruments, Other, Weather and Water.
Each channel comes with its own volume control and other settings. It is for instance possible to make a channel random so that its sound loop is only played a specific amount of times per minute, ten minutes or hour.
If there is a downside to the service it is the fact that downloading music to your PC is not free. You have to pay between $5 and $16 depending on the length of the audio that you want.
It is possible to bypass this with sound recorders but it may not be legal in the country you are living in. It is however possible to listen to the songs online. This however is not applicable for me, considering that I do not want to hear my PC running in the background while trying to sleep. While it is almost silent, it is still noticeable.
Users who just want to listen can pick a popular composition on the main page or use the Ambient categories to find something that they like to listen to.
You can check out Ambient Mixer here.
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The warning message about AAC streams when you load streams is because you don’t have the free Orban AAC/aacPlus Player Plugin installed.
http://codecpack.co/download/Orban-aacPlus-Player-Plugin.html
Justin, thanks for the information.
does this support AAC ? or only mp3 streaming
I’d say it supports all pls streams but I have not tried that so cannot verify it 100%.
Thank you Martin for a most informative and viable solution (it allowed me to play streams from a Netherland internet radio station in my WMP)! Continued success to you!
Barnabas (USA)
Your steps’ recommendation is still valid until 7th October 2012.. Thank you very much !!
Thank you!
You must convert file.pls to file.m3u
because file.pls open with winamp and file.m3u open with wmp.
Hi
2017 still kicking on Windows 7
Thx a ton
Hey, even i can do it, i stumbled through it and it works great! The only instruction advice i will add as i had to figure this out, when the wmp box opens that says save or open the bar on right says wmp click that drop down and select “open pls in wmp” once you do that it will work . Took me quite some time to discover that as i am no computer expert by any means. Having said that, previously i had downloaded codec packages and something about aac. None did any good. This rocks, i listen to a lot of internet radio and a number of them have dropped flash player and getting wmp to work had been a nightmare. So many thanks for this great solution to another problem that Micro-Hell will not even address. Peace- Out
openplsinwmp came in a zip file. I unpacked it, and didn’t find anything that looks like an executable, and even the files in the “doc” folder were in a format windows didn’t recognize. I’m not stupid. you said it would open effortlessly. It didn’t. This a rabbit hole I don’t want to go down.