Friday, October 2, 2009

Free Sample Friday: Real Audio Buffer Distortion


Back in the days before DSL and cable modems, getting online meant using a woefully slow dial-up connection. Because of this, streaming media wasn't as common back then, but when you did find it, it was usually in RealAudio format. This was extremely lo-fi, but did an admirable job at the time. The one major problem with it was if your connection slowed, you'd often get strange sorts of distortion not unlike comb filtering as the buffer struggled to keep up.

So today's free samples consist of some recordings I made about 7 years ago of just these types of distortion. (Bonus points to anyone who can figure out what I was trying to listen to when these occurred). These might not be terribly useful as-is, but with a little editing, I think they could serve as the basis for some interesting sounds.


There are 15 sounds in total as 16-bit WAVs.

4 comments:

dcp84 said...

Nice samples.

Remind me of days attempting to stream audio live from my decks around 1999-2001 on a dialup modem. With similar artifacts.

Also remind me slightly of the artifacts generated with MP3 encoding errors. I've often wondered if and how it would be possible to create those on demand.

dave romero said...

ok, so who's gonna make the plugin that emulates this?

Radiophobic said...

That totally brings me back. I remember sitting there with a tape deck and a cdplayer car kit connected to my computer making mixtapes with realaudio clips.

mangadrive said...

Closest thing I've ever heard to repeating those glitches from Mp3s was the noise the "Alien signal" made in Transformers the movie.

I would definitely like a plugin that does this, with patience you can do similar with a bitcrusher that allows automation on the frequency (Decimator would work) and cleaver use of db glitch's tape stopping and modulation/retriggering.