Malcirum
abadideaI feel like surely people on this network would appreciate knowing that the BBC sound effect library, from which you may freely download, has 716 distinct recordings of clocks specifically https://sound-effects.bbcrewind.co.uk/
when I was in university 15 years ago, I meticulously checked out all the BBC sound effect library CDs which the school library had and ripped them, knowing that they were a precious priceless resource I'd lose access to the moment I graduated. And then they released it all for free online, which is fantastic
Sgeo@0xabad1dea Does Doctor Who use sound effects from this library? And would a game from ~2001 likely use this library? I've been trying to figure out why I constantly hear sounds I recognize from Creatures Docking Station in Doctor Who.
@sgeo probably and probably, they've been commercially available for a long time
Daniel AJ Sokolov@0xabad1dea "The collection was largely established between the 1960s and the early 2000s, at which point the demands of productions and the benefits of digital recording outweighed the necessity of developing the collection further."
???
???
@newstik I think? they mean it became much easier to license sounds on a case by case basis from other companies so they didn't have to do so much in-house
@0xabad1dea So where can I obtain, say, a recording of a 2014 Honda CR-V door shutting?
I would understand the BBC library to be about preserving sounds. (Like that 1969 vehicle door shutting, that is mentioned.) After all, the BBC does not allow commercial use.
To stop the work because "licensing is now cheap and easy" doesn't ring true, because the value lies in someone making the recordings in the first place. :-)
@newstik the value to us lies in the BBC having made these recordings in the first place and then being kind enough to post them, but they made them in the first place because they were producing thousands of hours of television per year
obviously I would love it if they just kept going, though, but you can check archive.org for many thousands more recordings made by random people :)
@0xabad1dea True, but where is the BBC going to get these sounds for their own needs? Legally?
Steven Heywood@newstik @0xabad1dea
For the most part it's not the BBC's problem. The creation of television output is mostly outsourced to production companies and the licensing headaches, including paying for any from the BBC sound library.
I don't know if the internal market experiment died a death or not. The story about the income target for the sound library being so high it was too expensive for in-house productions to use it is probably apocryphal.
@Stevenheywood I am confused. income target?
@0xabad1dea
It's a financial sleight of hand from the world of internal markets. Your organisation decides that your department is a cost centre with a budget of £10 and that there is a commercial trading relationship with the rest of the organisation (accounts, HR, etc.) then imposes an income target, say £1, in which case your budget is £10 but you are given £9 and have to charge other departments for your services to make up that other £1.
It's a financial sleight of hand from the world of internal markets. Your organisation decides that your department is a cost centre with a budget of £10 and that there is a commercial trading relationship with the rest of the organisation (accounts, HR, etc.) then imposes an income target, say £1, in which case your budget is £10 but you are given £9 and have to charge other departments for your services to make up that other £1.
@0xabad1dea
If anybody asks then the organisation has invested £10 in your department even though it has given it £9.
All the cost centres in the organisation will have income targets, though these may be £0.
This is presented as market-driven efficiency, the top-slicing of each cost centre's budget effectively means each can be presented as operating at a discount. In the real world this is a nonsense but if your organisation is large and complex enough it can look reasonable.
@0xabad1dea
There are hidden costs which nobody ever mentions. You have to spend time deciding what you need to charge for each thing you do so as not just break even but make a profit to meet that income target. You'll need to manage those transactions, typically needing software, hardware and maintenance as well as staff time. You'll be a customer as well as a vendor, extra accounting costs, and you'll have to pay for it to be audited.
There are hidden costs which nobody ever mentions. You have to spend time deciding what you need to charge for each thing you do so as not just break even but make a profit to meet that income target. You'll need to manage those transactions, typically needing software, hardware and maintenance as well as staff time. You'll be a customer as well as a vendor, extra accounting costs, and you'll have to pay for it to be audited.
@0xabad1dea
Whenever you see a politician stand up on their hind legs and say: "We have invested x in…" ask yourself whether it's really x minus the income target minus the costs arising from an entirely spurious internal market.
Whenever you see a politician stand up on their hind legs and say: "We have invested x in…" ask yourself whether it's really x minus the income target minus the costs arising from an entirely spurious internal market.
@0xabad1dea
(One place I worked was given capital to start a new service hiring out stuff. The income target was higher than the capital grant so we didn't have the money to buy the stock to then hire it out. But we couldn't not buy the stock because we had an income target that we had to meet so we bought from other budgets. The only way to meet the income target and repay those budgets was to charge so high as to put potential customers off. The public only ever saw that initial investment.)
(One place I worked was given capital to start a new service hiring out stuff. The income target was higher than the capital grant so we didn't have the money to buy the stock to then hire it out. But we couldn't not buy the stock because we had an income target that we had to meet so we bought from other budgets. The only way to meet the income target and repay those budgets was to charge so high as to put potential customers off. The public only ever saw that initial investment.)
@0xabad1dea
Apologies for the long answer to your question.
Apologies for the long answer to your question.
Rob\Viewdata UK@0xabad1dea
Must have been 1970s, I used to have a BBC sound effects LP! Sci-Fi sounds - spaceship liftoffs, automatic doors opening etc. I never had an actual use for it, I just loved listening to it.
Must have been 1970s, I used to have a BBC sound effects LP! Sci-Fi sounds - spaceship liftoffs, automatic doors opening etc. I never had an actual use for it, I just loved listening to it.
hukl@0xabad1dea @nblr just be aware of the licensing :)
Michael Horne@hukl Indeed. Free to use as long as you don't actually DO anything useful with them! 😕
Beko Pharm (deprecated)> i.e. if you monetise it, sell it, or charge for access to it, or if it is advertising-funded or commercially sponsored, then that counts as commercial use, and you will need to license the recording
This includes any video or website that has ads (promoting a "free product" in an article/video is considered advertisement). No idea how that is without affiliate status (no monetary gain). Does also not sound compatible with let's say CC BY. MAYBE with CC BY-NC (IANAL).
MarkRDavid
jonny (nonvenomous)@0xabad1dea
Oh my god I could get lost in here all day this is SUCH A GOOD library
Oh my god I could get lost in here all day this is SUCH A GOOD library
Klaudia (aka jinxx)
Vincent Tunru@0xabad1dea Do they have farts though?
@0xabad1dea Turns out you can download farts from the BBC: https://sound-effects.bbcrewind.co.uk/search?q=NHU05018097
ĸurth@0xabad1dea great great. thanks for sharing.
… and Father Dougal springs to mind :D
Kenner_Soft@Kenner_Soft if you were trying to send a reply, it got deleted somehow
Sci-Fi GirlOh wow! The nature sounds (specifically labeled animal calls etc), the comedy category ... so many fascinating things!
Thanks for sharing!!! 😎
Neil Craig@0xabad1dea The mixer mode on it is cool too - esp. for sound effects for theatre etc.
We also have a nice collection of "empty sets" - images to use as virtual backgrounds for video calls etc. https://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/empty_sets_collection/zfvy382
@tdp_org @0xabad1dea
Hehe.. Couple of years ago, when meetings with school went online using Teams, I used the Tweenies set as background... Nobody even mentioned it :(
Hehe.. Couple of years ago, when meetings with school went online using Teams, I used the Tweenies set as background... Nobody even mentioned it :(
Frank Skornia@0xabad1dea When I was a theater sound tech and designer in college, I would have killed to have access to a sound library like this.
And their licensing seems open enough that student theater presentations would be free to use it, but I would want to email them to be sure
And their licensing seems open enough that student theater presentations would be free to use it, but I would want to email them to be sure
M0KHR
Mark Pauley
Chuck@0xabad1dea @jw Well I know what I (or rather my computer) will be doing for a while. Hint—it rhymes with “clownloading”
Kevin Marks@0xabad1dea it also has Major Bloodnok's stomach from the Goon Show https://sound-effects.bbcrewind.co.uk/search?q=07005147
@0xabad1dea I originally got the LP with this on from the local library, and freaked out my mum by playing it on the living room hi-fi
Bee O'Problem 
@0xabad1dea I didn't know about this.
Always appreciate a huge library of more stock sounds to build game sounds from
b4ux1t3 
#1️⃣@beeoproblem be careful.
These are not openly licensed, they're free to use for non-commercial purposes.
There is also verbiage in their legal matter about not altering their content.
Hard to tell how much they actually care, though. I'd imagine that the worst case is they ask you to pay a license fee.
@b4ux1t3 Sounds like I've got some reading to do then. Depending on how it's defined not being allowed to alter the sounds is a dealbreaker. EDIT: unless licensing with money allows it and it's cheap enough
Chloé Raccoon@0xabad1dea @darac And if you stick a set of them together, you can always end the sound with: "What time is it Eccles?"
JamminJerry@0xabad1dea is there a huge zip file you can download, or do you have to get them one at a time? just asking as I love downloading sound effects for stuff.
@JamminJerry I don't think they offer bulk downloads on the site, but it wouldn't surprise me if someone else has already scraped and zipped them for this purpose
Zorro Notorious MEB 😡@0xabad1dea I'll see your not-exaclty-freely-licensed "content" and I'll raise you https://freesound.org/
@znmeb you can suggest another site with different licensing terms without saying "content" with scare quotes as if I'm posting AI-generated slop
@0xabad1dea Sorry ... I'm not a fan of the term "content" and I was poking fun at BBC, not you, after reading their screed about licensing.
I know what I want to do with downloaded sounds - I make (or used to make) musique concrete. That's virtually impossible to do now without breaking the law. But many of the sounds at freesound.org are licensed freely enough that I can use them.
"Freesound in the era of generative Artificial Intelligence"
Aaron Sawdey, Ph.D.@0xabad1dea My dogs are more interested in the fact that there are 892 search results for "door bell" 😂
@acsawdey BBC going around and systematically recording every doorbell in the UK to make sure they capture the true spirit of the nation
Don Raved Tips@0xabad1dea thought is for non-commercial use and needs to be credited. I do however want to listen to the clocks and many other sounds of course.
jesterchen42
Paul Dunning@0xabad1dea I borrowed all the records the local library had when I was a kid. The idea that you could have sounds like they fascinated me.
@0xabad1dea that's awesome. :) -t
Jessamyn@0xabad1dea I went straight to clocks when I found out about it.
neoteotihuacan@0xabad1dea You have no idea how much I needed this.
💡𝚂𝗆𝖺𝗋𝗍𝗆𝖺𝗇 𝙰𝗉𝗉𝗌📱@0xabad1dea
Yeah I showed this resource to my Computer Science classes when we were doing making a podcast - so many sound effects in there!
Yeah I showed this resource to my Computer Science classes when we were doing making a podcast - so many sound effects in there!
Kee Hinckley@0xabad1dea @jackyan So, a funny story about my experience with the BBC Sound Effects library.
My daughter’s partner is a foley editor.
My daughter and I share an iTunes account (dating back to when she was little).
One year, for her partner’s birthday, she organized his entire music collection—albums completed with missing songs, cover art added, everything labeled and normalized—and merged it with hers. She did not mention this to me.
So there I am in my car, with my music library on random play, and all of a sudden my stream is a mix of songs and random clips like “VAUXHALL CARLTON, 1.8 LITRE SALOON 1986 MODEL STARTING”!
Doug Baker - Elbows Up! 🇨🇦@0xabad1dea 716, you say? I don't have time for that many.
Ross of Ottawa@0xabad1dea I used to have some subset of those on cassette tape when I was a kid. Great fun.