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My first CD production seems to have been favorably received by its intended audience of one, a two year old. It was fairly short, a test to find out if the effort might be worthwhile. Now I would like to find more material from which to create more variations.
The material is animal sounds and musical instruments, along with my narration to introduce the sounds and then to play some games. I downloaded animal sounds from a number of websites, but they all seem to suffer from several limitations. I want better quality, and more variations. Buying recordings, on CD or DVD, seems like the most probable route, if only I could find something to purchase.
The downloads were all severely frequency restricted, mostly 5kHz to 7kHz cutoffs, sometimes significantly less, and a large proportion are 8 bit. Sample rates were just about everything possible from 8kHz to 22kHz (had to reset those to 22050Hz), but even the lowest rates mostly showed severe low pass filtering well below the sample rate limits. Many of the 16 bit clips clearly had been 8 bit, or had previously been in a low quality lossy compression format.
The CDs I've found for sale are mostly of very limited selections: entire CDs of birdsong from Costa Rico and other such specialized content. I've found no quality recording that contain much variety. Buying all the different CDs I did locate, while a quite expensive option, would not cover very many types of animals in total. My ideal collection consists of several different (not too long) recordings of all common temperate climate animals (sheep, turkeys, squirrels, snakes, etc.) and the more widely known tropical, sub tropical, and arctic types (lions, zebras, penguins, etc).
There is one 10 (or 12?) CD set of "sound effects," a small subset of which are animals. Many, perhaps all, can be downloaded from the website for free as individual clips. All the downloads are 8 bit. While the idea, many short clips, is good from my viewpoint, there is nothing on the web site to suggest the CD's content is better quality. This makes the purchase expensive, mostly for unrelated and useless material, and quite possibly nothing more than I already downloaded.
So, is anyone familiar with one or several sources I might be able to obtain?
Musical instruments are a different matter. A great quantity of quality recordings obviously exist. I have enough albums of a few instruments, such as solo piano and guitar, to provide essentially unlimited material. Finding solo clips of many other instruments is a daunting task, however. For instance, I examined many tracks from a album by a noted Trumpet player. While there was certainly a lot of trumpet to listen to, I found nothing that was trumpet and nothing else but trumpet.
I have two different "introduction to the orchestra albums" as well as Britten's Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra. That latter is not well suited to this project; it has very little real solo performance. The other two are better, but are only a starting point. I need more variety for each instrument.
While the musical instrument requirements can probably be filled from my existing albums, given enough time, I'm wondering if there is such a thing as a collection of many short clips of many solo instruments playing many different kinds of music?
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