Phil Bradley's weblog

Audiosear.ch closes its doors. What now for podcast searching?

Very disappointed to see that Audiosear.ch has closed its doors as of the end of last month. It was a really good podcast search engine and I always started my podcast searches there. If you're casting around (hah! See what I did there?) for an alternative, try Listen Notes which is excellent and indexes 415,107 podcasts and over 24.5 million episodes. It's a great tool and while I'm sorry to see Audiosear.ch go I'm not that worried since we've got this one as a great option instead. 

Spotify for literature

We generally tend to think of Spotify as a resource that streams music - and of course that's its primary goal, but it's worth knowing that as well as music, Spotify provides other things - such as sounds of nature (great if you want to get off to sleep listening to the sounds of rain or jungles or wotnot), but there's also a lot of spoken text as well. If you're a fan of Robert Frost the great American poet, there's some great recordings of him reading his own work, and it sends a real thrill down the spine to be able to hear him. If poetry isn't your style, how about listening to Sherlock Holmes, read by Basil Rathbone or Sir John Gielgud? While we're on Mr Holmes, how about listening to Mr Cumberbatch reading late night tales?

Can I tempt you to Jane Austen novels, or The Scarlet Pimpernel? How about Anthony Valentine reading The Count of Monte Cristo? If you fancy something a bit chilling, there's a collection of Ghost Stories of an Antiquary by M.R. James or the Best of Edgar Allen Poe?

Whatever your tastes, you're almost certain to find something that's interesting.

The Macaulay Library

The Macaulay Library is the world's largest and oldest scientific archive of biodiversity audio and video. It's mainly birdsong, and can be searched with the usual search box, or by category. It's an excellent collection, based on my very limited understanding of the subject area and if you've an interest in the great outdoors, it's worth a quick delve into.

FindSounds

OK, it's almost 19.00 on a Friday night, and you're desperate to get the sound that a zebra makes. (Don't ask why, you just are, work with me on this!) Where do you go? I'll tell you, you go to  FindSounds - Sound Types which is quite a funky little website. Along with the sounds of animals (including that zebra) you get hundreds of sounds. For example - there's not just one zebra sound, there are ten different ones. This is going to be zebra heaven for someone, you mark my words.

If you don't like zebras, try cannons, 19 different saxaphone sounds,  if you want to get really gross, there's 24 vomit sounds, 200 different Star Trek sounds, Scooby Doo's laugh, and dozens of others. You can Tweet them, listen to similar sounds and email them. Lots of fun for a friday evening.

Sound Effects & Clips | SoundCli.ps

via soundcli.ps

This is great fun. Do you need short and snappy sound effects for a podcast for example? Then try Soundclips. They have a wide variety of very short (10 seconds and less) sound files that you can download and they cover a huge range - science fiction photon blasts, dogs barking, offices, nightingale, waterfalls... this site will keep you occupied for hours as you 'just listen to one more'.

LYRICSnMUSIC

A Lyric and Music Search Engine for Music People by Music People. This is a nice engine. You get the lyrics nice and neatly, YouTube videos, a summary from Wikipedia, images, links to iTunes and Amazon, tour details and the opportunity to link to Facebook.

Musikki

Musikki. This is a nice search engine for musicians and bands. Nicely laid out, with comprehensive biographies, concert lists, map, Twitter references, similar/related artists, discography, photographs. Slightly odd not to see any MySpace references though - has that fallen so far? No links to individual songs or lyrics either, and no ITunes links either, which I thought was odd. Also no links to official sites or fanclubs. So it's ok, but not by any stretch of the imagination comprehensive.

Beemp3.com - MP3 Search

If you're trying to locate .mp3 files and having difficulty (and as was pointed out to me the other day, why doesn't Google have that as a file format option?) you might want to try Beemp3 which is a music search engine for locating an mp3-audio files over the Internet. They don't host any files - their crawler searches through the Net and indexes all the brand new and popular songs for you. Today they have 800 000 mp3 files in their search database and approximately 10 000 files are added daily.  Is it legal? Probably not, but I just bring you this stuff.

Mp3Realm

Mp3Realm is an evolving search engine focused distinctively on audio in Mp3 format. Mp3Realm allows you to search for your favorite songs and clips, and filter them out by file duration. Your searches can be based on artist, title, genre or album. Mp3Realm also index's lyrics, so you can sing along to your favorite songs.

Their index of mp3's is constantly growing and is updated daily with fresh links, and removal of dead links. The speed of the download's you find, will vary. This is because the files you download are not hosted by Mp3Realm servers, they are gathered from crawling the web. Mp3Realm hosts no mp3 files.

Is it entirely legal? That's up to you - I just find this stuff. ;)

Free Online Radio search engine

RadioTuna is worth a look if you're trying to track down radio stations to listen to. You can search by genre, artist or station. A search for an artist not only tells you which stations play that person/band, it also tells you where they're being played at that moment.

Listening to a station brings up a profile page with a station breakdown of genre, recent plays and artists. This does appear to only list music stations (Radio Five Live isn't included for example) and I couldn't find any BBC channels at all in fact. However, other than that - if you need to find music radio, this looks like it will be a good bet.