- Sound Clips

Audio Formats

The sounds here are stored in several formats:

RealAudio is a highly compressed format that keeps most of the original quality. I decided on this format several years ago, before MP3s were commonly used and didn't sound very good. For several reasons (the main one being that MP3 compressors are much better now), I'll probably phase it out and eventually replace all the compressed sounds with MP3. Until then, get the RealOne player for free from http://www.real.com/.

Windows .wav

These are the original clips copied from a VCR or CD, and are uncompressed so the quality is quite good. Unfortunately, they're also quite large, so I'd recommend using one of the compressed formats below if you want to do something with these clips other than listen to them.

Shorten® compressed .wav

These are identical to the .wav files, but are compressed using a program called Shorten. The compression is lossless, which means that no quality is lost unlike with MP3 compression. The files are about 60-80% of the size of the .wav files, so if you have the Shorten decompressor I recommend using this format. A compressor/decompressor and plugins for several audio players (all of which are free) can be found at http://www.etree.org/shncom.html and http://www.etree.org/software.html.

MP3

These are MP3 compressed files, which means you'll need an MP3 player to hear them. Most computers come with one these days, so this shouldn't be a problem. Try to copy them to your computer instead of streaming them from mine, since the web server they're stored on is limited to 6kb/sec downloads, and if everyone tried listening to them at once it wouldn't work very well. This also gives you your own copy to listen to whenever you want. Don't try to use these for themes or try to edit them. The quality isn't that great (I try for size over quality for MP3s) so you'd be better off with Shorten-compressed files if you can use them.

The RealAudio files are linked to on the sounds pages of the various sections of BobNET. The other formats are stored on my own server at http://bobnet.dyndns.org/bobnet/sounds/. My server is limited in some respects; read that page before trying to download anything.

Use of Sound Clips

Copyright

Someone other than me has the copyright on just about all of the sounds here; I just copied them from the VCR/CD player and did some noise reduction on a few of them. I'm not making any money off of them, and I'm sure fair dealing exists since they're only meant for the enjoyment of visitors to this site. If anyone who has a claim to the copyright of any of the clips on BobNET disagrees with my interpretation of Canada's copyright laws, I'd appreciate it if they'd email me at the address at the bottom of the page and I'll remove the offending clip(s).

Usage

As I said above, I don't "own" these clips, so I can't really control their use. Use them in themes (several Red Green themes have used clips from BobNET), for your own enjoyment, or on your own page (a few SCTV sites include clips from my collection). I'd appreciate it if you credited me for them (it did take some work), but it's not necessary. I'd also advise you not to try to make money off of them. That would probably make the lawyers of the real copyright owner very angry.

Copyright ©2002, 2005 Chris "Bob" Odorjan