Days of music and ambient audio served up with no searching, little setup, and no subscription:

• PartyCloud (Flash) auto-syncs millions of musical tracks to create your own mixes.
• 75 minutes of thunder and rain; a half-hour audio recording in the Amazon rainforest; 24 hours of the engines of the starship Enterprise at idle (previously).
• Sonos Terra mixes musical tracks with ambient background sounds (jungle, stream, ocean, and more).

[more inside]
posted by Bora Horza Gobuchul on Jun 9, 2012 - 16 comments

There are days that your MP3 player has died, searching YouTube for music feels like too much work, and you just want some sounds to mask the world. A few options:
8Tracks has playlists to suit your mood (having a one-person dance party, gaming, sad, and many more); if you want something a little more ambient, SimplyNoise provides white, pink and brown noise; RainyMood, the sounds of an endless rainy day. [more inside]
posted by Bora Horza Gobuchul on Mar 22, 2011 - 16 comments

Soundmaps are field recordings of the unique audio ecology of a particular place and time. Often they are cities: New York, Berlin, Montreal, New Orleans, Barcelona, London (previously), Madrid, and many others. Sometimes they move through space: Ramallah. Sometimes they are mixable (probably my favorite, from Portugal). They might be of entire countries (Spain, the United States (previously), the United Kingdom, or continents (Africa, while on a bike!). Sometimes they cover the entire world: aporee (you may prefer the map interface). Some attempt to preserve sounds that are in danger of being lost. And sometimes soundmaps are of the deep ocean. Most of the sounds are, appropriately, licensed under Creative Commons.
posted by Bora Horza Gobuchul on Sep 6, 2010 - 8 comments

The Sound of Magic: an amazing homage to the ambient sounds of various Disney Mecca, is also an amazing site: beautiful, whimsical, nicely architected, and with plenty of content [via DollarShort]
posted by silusGROK on Oct 17, 2002 - 8 comments

fLOW is a fascinating ambient sound generator for Mac G3 computers. It uses the Mac's built-in DSP to create "sounds that resemble - metaphorically - the timbres of water, fire, earth, and air." If you don't have a Mac, there are Real audio files so you can hear what you're missing.
posted by cfj on Mar 4, 2001 - 0 comments