Sampling from the Web

[friendship]

I watch a lot of Netflix and would like to take WAV files of little bits of dialog and foley that I like and then manipulate those samples in my DAW. I don't know how to do the first part though, ripping audio from web content. I use a Macintosh computerborg. What do I need?

[Dr. Sherman Sticks M.D.]

there might be a better way but
you could either record the audio out from your mac to an external source. or even route it back into an interface into your DAW.
or u might be able to use soundflower or a similar program to route the audio internally to your DAW.

[DRodriguez]

I was going to say, the simplest free way to do it would be to use soundflower and record it with QuickTime. Then import into your DAW. The best paid way to do it is via a program called audio hijack. You just chose the program you want to hijack, and then you can give it loads of instructions and insert plugins in real time. That will isolate audio by program, so no risk of recording unwanted noises and alerts.

[friendship]

Cool, thanks guys. I'll look into Soundflower. Looking forward to making pads out of pitched down, heavily-processed monster screams.

[rustywire]

When I was an XP user, I would sample direct from the motherboard's integrated audio/converters with SoundForge 5.0, anything playing on the computer. Or I'd run the audio-out through the stock 1/8" stereo jack into a mixer/MPC setup.
With Mac I prefer to sample from my audio iface. Because Apogee converters by themselves just make everything sound better compared to those other methods. Even working with lossy sources & unbalanced signals. To my ears, anyway.
I'll route the signal into a mixer/MPC/S950 by way of tube preamps, fet comp & inductor eq etc...just to get some circuitry color & see what suits the sample...then pitch down in the Akai samplers.

[DRodriguez]

Those other methods don't really sound worse, because you're dealing with digital audio. It's never leaving the realm of digital when using soundflower or audio hijack. It is 1 to 1, 0 to 0.The rest is just adding noise. Nice noise, but that can always be added later in the sample tweaking stage.

[rustywire]

Clinical copypasta sampling doesn't sound as good to my ears. Admittedly I'm a lo & mid-fi sampling kinda guy. Who buys 12bit samplers for clinical sampling (they do have SPDIF but who cares) when you can hit the converters hard and make things more interesting? Noise rulz #1. Embrace it

[friendship]

Gnarly undersampling can be a lot of fun, for sure. For my purposes I'm apathetic to sampling quality as my ultimate goal is heavy processing that usually involves at least some fidelity abuse, but a clean D/D conversion suits me fine.

[rustywire]

A fav thing about SF 5.0 was sampling at any frequency up to 200khz...even though my system was capped at 96khz in 192khz out. But the pres & converters were lackluster, which could be exploited. I could somewhat coax out hardware sampler-like textures by using uncommon bit/sample rate combinations. Sometimes it meant 20bit 15khz sometimes it meant 16bit 50khz, 24bit 27.5khz. Realized it was me trying to mimic nonlinear-12bit character and failing. That's what I like best. Bitcrushers are awesome but don't help scratch the itch. So I just went the hardware route, even to sample from the web.

[friendship]

Bit crushers are a lot of fun but in my experience are pretty rough in how they reduce bit and sample depth, so you can't get much nuance with weird in-betweens of digital fidelity sometimes, like the kind you're talking about. What were the non-linear characteristics you were trying to imitate? What examples were you drawing from to capture that sound?

[rustywire]

Some frequencies become accentuated, gain resonance & smear while altering the harmonic content in comb-filtery ways. Especially when pitching down. The bottom end seems to benefit more than the highs. But the highs rolloff in a very pleasant way like there's a wide bump before the dip
Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) is a good example
Also Endtroducing

And these

[D.o.S.]

Lots of good info here. Typically you can trick your DAW into recording your computer noise fairly easily, but like DR.Dr brought up, you can get some unwanted noise if you're not careful.

[rustywire]

I've tried to do this within DAWs and digital recording software but it just....doesn't

[JereFuzz]

I watch a lot of Netflix and would like to take WAV files of little bits of dialog and foley that I like and then manipulate those samples in my DAW. I don't know how to do the first part though, ripping audio from web content. I use a Macintosh computerborg. What do I need?

I've dealt with this a while back and have used a very easy technique. I use a Zoom H1 Handy Recorder:



I play Netflix, youtube, dvds, etc. on my computer and run an audio line out of it. Some laptops only have the phones/mic output. In that case you need a phone/mic splitter:



You run a stereo 1/8 cable from the phone jack:



Put that jack into the Zoom H1 or other recording device. Set up the recording device to your desire (16/44, 24/44, 16/44.8, etc.) and hit record on the device. Find the spot in the movie that you want record and hit play (again, hit record first on the recording device).

After you are done recording send the wav file to your desktop and slice/dice it with free Audacity (donate $5 to keep it going) and export it in a file format that your sampler will accept.

[JereFuzz]

Since this thread has been dead for a while, I'm gonna hijack this one ...

Where are some good resources for samples? Here are a few I know of ...

Old School Hardware Samples: http://samples.kb6.de/downloads.php
Free User Created Uploads: http://www.freesound.org/
Field Recordings (my favorite type of samples): http://www.luftrum.com/

I'm gonna create some and upload to freesound.org when I have collected adequate stuff ...

regards