thames

README

Thames

Thames is a browser and player for the BBC Sound Effects collection which contains sounds from cafes, markets, cars, typewriters, nature etc. You can browse the collection online at http://bbcsfx.acropolis.org.uk/.

Thames creates an index for the collection in an sqlite3 database, makes full text queries to it, downloads sounds, and then plays them. Each query is an sqlite3 full-text search query and is applied verbatim. Usually it is a single term or a phrase but you can also use NEAR queries.

For the first run, it downloads the index from BBC and creates the database, so it will be a bit slow. During playback, the sounds are downloaded in the background so ideally, depending on the sound and download durations, there will be no delay in playback except for the first sound.

Examples

Play sounds from cafes:

thames cafe

Play sounds from cafes and then from typewriters:

thames cafe typewriter

Play sounds from cafes and typewriters interleaved:

thames --shuffle cafe typewriter

Mix sounds from cafes and typewriters, feel like an author:

thames --mix cafe typewriter

Go out in the wild nature:

thames --mix wind rain water fire

Browse sounds from space:

thames --query space

Installation

Thames is tested only with go 1.14 on debian linux, including WSL and crostini.

First you must install play(1) with:

sudo apt-get install sox

Then:

go get github.com/anastasop/thames

Thames has a dependency on the sqlite3 driver https://github.com/mattn/go-sqlite3 which is a cgo driver. If the installation of thames fails then probably you should install the sqlite3 driver manually and then thames.

Bugs

• Make the sound player configurable.
• Add a flag to play only cached files.
• Add more randomness when mixing or interleaving sounds.