6 ms·
Ambient Scotrail Beats – Relax to Scottish train announcements over low-fi beats
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- _HMCB_ 4y agoEvery now and then life rewards you with something unexpected and perfect. This is one of those times.
- amaccuish 4y agoNow all that needs to be done is make this into a radio station for Sonos. Sunday sorted.
- kratom_sandwich 4y agoReminds me of youarelistening.to which is ambient music + police radio
- mhd 4y agoI'm getting a "Dr Blair, Dr Blair, Dr Jay Hamilton, Dr Jay Hamilton..." vibe.
- mjmasn 4y agoVery soothing. Now I'm wondering how common "a supermarket trolley on the track earlier on this train's journey" is in Scotland that they needed to pre-record that audio. https://scotrail.datasette.io/scotrail/announcements/0923 https://scotrail.datasette.io/scotrail/announcements/0923
- vocram 4y agoWhy can’t I play it in background?
- matteason 4y agoPlease see this reply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32538369 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32538369 Sorry, I know it's annoying. It does work in the background on desktop.
- xbar 4y agoSweet Matt. Maybe a master volume slider soon?
- Dr_ReD 4y agoLOL! The first time I tried it, there where no announcements Because U-Block was blocking something, and I waited, and I waited... :) Much better now though, with the announcements. Very soothing. The only thing missing is the thick Scottish accent I was expecting. ;-P
- samwillis 4y agoInfo here: https://mobile.twitter.com/MattEason/status/1560772439713452032 https://mobile.twitter.com/MattEason/status/1560772439713452... The gist is someone submitted a FOI request for the audio of the Scotrail announcements, it was published, now someone made this with it. Love it!
- reaperducer 4y agoInteresting that he had to FOI the audio. Tokyo Metro sells its station jingles and announcements on a CD in its gift shop. I loaded a bunch of them into my iPhone and use them for ringtones.
- _HMCB_ 4y agoCan they be bought online?
- bobthepanda 4y agoactually sampling them and distributing them would be another matter entirely. even public entities aren't always super carefree about their trademarks. Transport for London and New York's MTA are two public agencies that vigorously defend their trademarked and copyrighted design materials.
- motohagiography 4y agoThis is hilariously perfect.
- martinald 4y agoHahaha. Excellent.
- bobthepanda 4y agoYukika, a Kpop artist, recorded something similar: All Flights Are Delayed https://youtu.be/aHjPBWJKJyM https://youtu.be/aHjPBWJKJyM
- matteason 4y agoI made this! Thanks for posting it, I'll gladly answer any questions. The samples are available here on GitHub: https://github.com/matteason/scotrail-announcements-june-2022 https://github.com/matteason/scotrail-announcements-june-202... ...and here on Google Drive: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/172W6sXnvlr7UcNLipO8BTw417_KRz9c5 https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/172W6sXnvlr7UcNLi... We crowdsourced transcriptions for all the clips and Simon Willison built an interactive dashboard to explore them: https://scotrail.datasette.io/scotrail/ https://scotrail.datasette.io/scotrail/ The announcements are read by voice-over artist Alison McKay: https://www.alisonmckay.com/ https://www.alisonmckay.com/
- skruger 4y agoThis will be the new soundtrack to my life. Many thanks, Matt
- jcynix 4y agoNice, but neither produces any output in Materialistic (Hackernews reader on Android) nor the Duckduckgo browser. Does play in Google Chrome. All on Android 11.
- noSyncCloud 4y agoWorks fine in Glider (HN app) in WebView on Android 12
- pingiun 4y agodo you sync up the announcements with the music? it kind of sounds like it's synced somewhat
- matteason 4y agoNo, it's completely random! After each announcement ends there's a random delay of between 0 and n seconds, where n is 15 by default but adjustable with the 'frequency' slider. I think you just end up with bits that sound synchronised because they happen to fall on the beat
- wrycoder 4y agosoma.fm sf 10-33 ambient music + San Francisco scanners [0] [0] https://somafm.com/sf1033/index.html https://somafm.com/sf1033/index.html
- throwaway888abc 4y agoThis! And also Mission Control ♥♥♥ Cool project anyway!
- CamperBob2 4y agoAwesome. Sounds like the Sons & Daughters lead singer, but more, well, ambient.
- FujiApple 4y agoMy new favourite “Reason”: Sheep on the railway (1067)
- ThePadawan 4y agoI'm fascinated that these (ostensibly internal) reasons are actually broadcast. Coming from Germany, I'm used to the reason for a train delay being announced as one of - "people near the tracks" - "waiting for another delayed train" or - "operational issues", which ...yeah that includes everything else It's kind of charming that delayed Scottish people get to bond over yesterday's theft of overhead line electrification equipment.
- 3dbrows 4y agoWe also have a lot of infuriatingly tautological explanations, for example: “We apologise that this train has only 2 carriages today. This is because the additional carriages failed to enter service.” Well, yes.
- robocat 4y agoAll the reasons: https://scotrail.datasette.io/scotrail?sql=select+*+from+announcements+where+category+%3D+%22Reason%22+order+by+file https://scotrail.datasette.io/scotrail?sql=select+*+from+ann... Playing many of them simultaneously is soothing.
- simonw 4y agoI have been having SO MUCH fun playing with this today. I just published a detailed write-up of my experiments so far: https://simonwillison.net/2022/Aug/21/scotrail/ https://simonwillison.net/2022/Aug/21/scotrail/
- opan 4y agoOn mobile if I change app focus away from my browser, the train samples continue, but the YouTube part stops.
- kadoban 4y agoIn Firefox there's a browser extension to stop youtube from doing that.
- matteason 4y agoYeah - unfortunately YouTube really, really want you to pay for YouTube Premium so they don't allow videos to continue playing in the background. Sorry about that, I know it's annoying. There's nothing I can do about it for YouTube but I'll look at adding alternative music sources like SoundCloud