1 min read

Sonic Garbage

If you're a fan of random, YouTube-sourced audio that's perfect for looping in your sampler, checkout Polymetallic. *

Every time someone visits SonicGarbage, it performs a YouTube search with randomly generated phrases to discover videos. It then downloads these videos, processes their audio, and converts them into two formats ready for sampling: one-shot and loop. The site then generates a unique timestamped URL hosting each sample loop that was generated and adds it to an archive of random YouTube sample packs.

Since it takes close to a minute to run this process when you visit you'll be enjoying a page of samples generated by the last person who visited. You can trigger and loop the sounds by clicking and hovering over the YouTube IDs, simulating a live sampler. Right-clicking the IDs allows you to download the looped sample files. The code for this project is accessible on GitHub.

This idea was sparked by a tweet I saw and further influenced by a subsequent tweet showcasing a web version, prompting me to quickly toss it together.

* Since this is running on a free Google e2 micro-instance it is painfully slow, sorry! It works best in a desktop browser, though I might try to fix it so it runs properly on mobile web. I also made a Google Colab if you just want to generate audio samples and store them on your gDrive.