ambientmixer - a graphical multitrack audio player using pygame to play, edit and save ambient-mixer.com mixes locally

This script is based on Philooz's great script found here

https://github.com/Philooz/pyambientmixer

If you just want to play presets and don't need a graphical user interface and editing features you should check out his script!

This little hacked script is here to allow people to download and play ambient mixes stored on ambient-mixer.com. It's not really "out for all users", but it works enough to be public.

Getting Started

These instructions will get you a copy of the project up and running on your local machine for development and testing purposes. See deployment for notes on how to deploy the project on a live system. As a side note: I am using windows and so my commands and tools are tailored to match my OS choice.

Prerequisites

You'll need python3 installed on your system, with the python packages untangle, pygame, requests and docopt.

I recommend pip to install the required modules. Install them with

pip install requests pygame untangle docopt requests

You'll also need an OGG encoder, as I went with pygame (and because it's a free format). I recommend the easy-to-use tool fre:ac utility, which encodes a whole directory into ogg. The encoding can be started with the graphical interface or via batch commands (my choice since startable from pyhton). If you're a windows user, you can download the installer from

https://www.freac.org/

Installing

Just store ambient_mixer.py and ambient_downloader.py anywhere on your system.

Downloading a mix

Easy. Get to the mix you'd like to keep. In this example, I went with "Night in a Medieval Monastery".

Just run ambient_downloader.py with the url.

In our example :

python3 ambient_downloader.py http://religion.ambient-mixer.com/night-in-a-medieval-monastery

which will give us

Saved http://xml.ambient-mixer.com/audio/9/5/7/957298df7abb5d7e94e6323c45d94063.mp3 as sounds/3677.mp3.
Saved http://xml.ambient-mixer.com/audio/d/3/3/d33c249dc7497e59091fab0ef08ee283.mp3 as sounds/529.mp3.
Saved http://xml.ambient-mixer.com/audio/a/0/1/a015edfc739fd3c7d942823511ba869d.mp3 as sounds/329.mp3.
Saved http://xml.ambient-mixer.com/audio/4/9/a/49a0e9aef698b60cf2c43312225778b9.mp3 as sounds/5745.mp3.
Saved http://xml.ambient-mixer.com/audio/3/b/6/3b64e0b6dffd39bd239e8071c25a4f37.mp3 as sounds/4583.mp3.
Saved http://xml.ambient-mixer.com/audio/7/8/e/78ece9cbea4fe23031c07ce15278f84a.mp3 as sounds/3354.mp3.
Saved http://xml.ambient-mixer.com/audio/7/5/e/75e7d0a3c6c6ef6ed69b26e7098b208c.mp3 as sounds/6432.mp3.
Saved http://xml.ambient-mixer.com/audio/1/6/8/168498dfdf8743eefb46dfebfd09c9eb.mp3 as sounds/6773.mp3.

Once the downloads are complete, you'll get two folders inside the current directory : sounds_named, which contains all the sounds files you've downloaded (already converted from .mp3 to .ogg); and presets which holds all the .xml files corresponding to the presets.

Convert mp3s to oggs

The .mp3 files should already be converted to .ogg running the script ambient_downloader.py.

If for some reason that should not work or you don't want an automatic conversion you can trigger it by opening up fre:ac, selecting all downloaded mp3s and convert to ogg using the VORBIS codec.

If for some reason the original .mp3 files were not deleted you can do so by hand since they are not needed for this tool.

Playing the mix

Once you downloaded your mix, and you've converted the files, just play it with ambient_mixer.py. There are two ways to start playback of a preset:

1. Start script with preset file as parameter. Open ambient_mixer.py by calling

   python ambient_mixer.py presets/night-in-a-medieval-monastery.xml

2. Start script without preset file and select file in GUI.

   • Open ambient_mixer.py by calling

     python ambient_mixer.py

   • Click on File > Open... > select preset file and confirm with OK

You should see

Loaded Channel 1 : old Castle Background (looping), 529.ogg (volume 100, balance 0).
Loaded Channel 2 : Burning Torches (looping), 329.ogg (volume 71, balance 0).
Loaded Channel 3 : Door open with creak and close (random 1 per 10m), 5745.ogg (volume 21, balance 0).
Loaded Channel 4 : Flipping through large book (random 1 per 1m), 4583.ogg (volume 71, balance 0).
Loaded Channel 5 : Small Group Whispering (random 5 per 10m), 3354.ogg (volume 61, balance 0).
Loaded Channel 6 : echoing steps (looping), 6432.ogg (volume 100, balance 0).
Loaded Channel 7 : Writing with a quill (looping), 6773.ogg (volume 96, balance 0).

Relax and enjoy your mix! :)

Convert python script to exe (windows)

Since I will be running this script on multiple machines I do not want to install the python enviroment on all of them. Therefore I made a batch script to convert the python script to a simple .exe file. I chose to not pack everything into one .exe file since that gives me the opportunity to delete unneeded .dll files (unwanted packages). Pyinstaller currently has the

TODOS and possible bugs

• Crossfade needs to be implemented with fade switching between 2 identical tracks
• Download of presets via GUI with support for multiple links (large textbox)
• ...

Authors

• Philooz - Initial work - Philooz
• Alasterer - Addition of GUI and more features - Alasterer

License

This project is licensed under the GPL License.

Acknowledgments

• Thanks to ambient-mixer.com website
• Thanks to Philooz for the great downloading and sound playback scripts
• Huge thanks to the makers of the awesome python modules
• You for downloading this!