Free Software: sfxr – glitchy games effects generator

sfxr is a tiny little tool built for the purpose of quickly generating unique, but recognizably stock sounds for games, specifically games competitions, where dev time can be measured in hours.

Derek Yu used it to create sound effects for the rogueish treasure platformer Spelunky. Generated sound effects for a procedurally generated game. For me, of course, it’s just a fun little thing to play around with and make stupid noises.

Free music review: Faded Giant, by Conelrad (track)

It’s free music, listen to it. I’m going to gush about this for a minute.

Faded Giant – Conelrad (Community Shelter Planning)

What’s so marvelous about this music is that it manages to contain the spirit of ambient sonic wallpaper without being unimportant. At first, it’s an unremarkable, staticky drone, typical ambient material, but its simple, huge tones graduate deliberately until the listener cannot help but be affected.

I’m coming out of a dark forest into a wide expanse of ruined trees and hollow buildings, half obscured in poisoned mists. It is the discovery of something beautiful and horrible at the same time, after the fallout has sifted to below the soil, and the suffering of bodies has long since faded. Likely, this image is brought on by the combination of the artist’s name (Conelrad), and the frighteningly calm album title (Community Shelter Planning), the album cover (shown above), and finally, having recently completed Half Life, Episode 2…

So, yes, perhaps my interpretation of this track isn’t entirely original. Still an awesome track from a great album, and more than twelve minutes of it.

Conelrad’s catalog can be sampled freely at munchhouse.com/conelrad.

Ambient Nights – Free music, not bad after MP3DirectCut

The short: Quasi-netlabel Ambient-Nights.org serves up some good downtempo semi-ambient music for free, but you’ll only get them through BitTorrent, and each album is one long mp3 file– no individual tracks.

Long a fan of freely available music, I’d heard about Ambient-Nights a few years ago, but wasn’t all that thrilled with a few things:

• No direct downloads are freely available from the site. You have to use a BitTorrent client to obtain the mixes, which entails waiting and perhaps attracting unwanted attention from your ISP or other hideous parties.

Dark Winter Netlabel

To check out: http://www.darkwinter.com. Independent, free netlabel, specializing in ambient music. Hopefully, this isn’t a WIDE interpretation of the genre, but music actually intended to live in the background as wallpaper, we’ll see.

Sigh, another collection of mp3’s to tag, adjust the gain, and manually apply labels to.