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Show HN: I recorded nature sounds for a year, then released an ambient sound app (apps.apple.com)
11 points by disconnection on Sept 26, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 8 comments
There are lots of ambient sound apps on the App Store, but they all seem to be paywalled. I thought I should make one where all the content was free.

I bought a secondhand professional audio recorder, then took it to national parks in Australia and Germany, in case I heard anything interesting. It was a bit of a learning experience, but I now have a library of half a dozen passable recordings.

The biggest problem was noise pollution: humans are noisy and everywhere; I never noticed until I started listening carefully for background noise. Traffic and building noise carries for huge distances.

I wrapped all the sounds up in a swiftUI interface, built around a curved video carousel.

I wanted to pay special attention to vision impaired users, so it all has VoiceOver support, and extra UI elements that can be turned on for vision impaired users.

It's free on the App Store if you want to take a look.



How did you remove the background sound? Just cut the bits and pieces?


I just went really far into the nature, away from main roads or human habitation.

I use wind muffs to cut wind noise, and sometimes a low-pass filter to cut out any very distant traffic rumble.


oops, high-pass filter.


great! gonna try it out today as my focus music.


Awesome! I didn't want to go for 100% sleep-inducing sounds; hopefully it works as general background ambience.


needs min macOS 14 on mac app store. need to upgrade to try


Yup - SwiftUI is pretty immature still, so I use the latest iOS17 to get the latest features to make development simpler. For example, handling in-app purchases is hugely easier in iOS17.


got it. why not a cross platform framework like flutter and expose to a much larger android audience as well?




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