And now for something completely different! and this really is a long shot.
Recently I've noticed that several of my friends have commented about suffering 
from various degrees of Tinnitus and have chatted about what can be done to 
make things a bit more comfortable.  One gadget idea is using background noise 
to mask some of the effect.  That got me thinking if the Soundscape project 
might help i.e. use your mobile to generate a nice background to help mask the 
problems of tinnitus.

If you have friends who suffer it might be worth mentioning it to them to see 
if it helps.

As always feedback most welcome, they might even want to start playing trains 
too!

If you do have problems with tinnitus you can also find help at:-

Recently had a problem on another website that I work on that may rarely
effect this page so can you please check that your browser is right up to
date and that the bottom line of this page ends with  the following message
'(CAV = 11/01/2022 @ 11:40)' (or a later date).  If it doesn't please try 
pressing F5 or Ctrl+F5 to force your browser to reload the page from scratch.

As a point of interest if you are experiencing problems with any web page you
use frequently it's worth giving this a go!

Here comes another year! Hope you've all had a peaceful Christmas and that you
got some new bits for your train sets.  Don't forget to fire up the Soundscapes 
to go with it!

Please do tell your friends about what the soundscape project might do for their
layout and watch out for more developments in 2022.

Happy new year.

Most of the site is up at the moment but there are still snags with the
departure boards which I hope to look at over the Christmas week - keep a 
lookout for updates!

The year saw the addition of some new screen layouts to make things less 
cluttered and hopefully easier to use overal.

The library of Soundscapes page now includes a brief description of each of the
Soundscapes, these were taken from the individual Soundscape pages to clean
them up a bit and it just seemed to be a better place to have them.

Testing all this stuff on various platforms and devices continues, during a bit 
of sofa testing one evening showed that the Soundscape project also works via 
my LG Smart TV! had one or two odd moments with it but I'm working on that.

Looking round over the year I spotted that there are at least three main products which 
offer the ability to add some sounds to a layout:-
* Bachmann's Water tower,
* Hornby's sound van,
* Gaugemaster sound modules.

I think the Soundscape project has the edge over these products in that the 
system is much more flexible, expandable and cheaper as you probably already 
have all the equipment you'll need to start playing right away!

During the year I had several people say they could not hear any sounds which 
in many cases can be tracked down to there browser being set to block the 
automatic playing of audio when a page is first loaded or an out of date 
version of the browser.  Details of how to check version numbers and how to 
alter autoplay of sounds can be found in the Soundscape project user guide page.

The year saw me cleaning up menu layouts and adding a few more sounds to the 
various soundscapes.  

Earlier this year I made a minor update to the Sponsership message which now 
includes a link to the sponsors web site - Would your business or club benefit 
from this sort of advert?

The upgraded tannoy system had some added features including the 'Tannoy 
editing page' which allows you to edit some of the announcements and features.

Station wide and platform specific selectable messages are now available.


The tannoy editor and control page allows you to do such things as change the 
station name, view the next 10 departures in time order, and alter delay and 
cancellation reasons for all platforms; see the user guide page for more 
details.  More features are on their way too.

You can now alter the schedule time my using the time combo boxes rather than
the original time forward/backward buttons.

The basics of two real stations now appear in the soundscape library for you to 
play with; Eggesford in north Devon and Letchworth garden city in Hertfordshire.

The voices used on the station Tannoy were upgraded and are now varied and now 
include a slight reverb making them more realistic.  the existing flat voices 
will continue to be used for system messages.

The new voices should sound more realistic but they do come at a price so
PLEASE do let me know what you think and if you do use the soundscapes 
frequently making a small donation towards the costs of the voices and web
hosting would be appreciated.

With this cost in mind the automatic reading of announcements will switch off after 
1 hour, turn it back on again with the Auto Tannoy ON switch in the time 
control buttons panel towards the top of the station soundscape pages.

Multi language announcements will be available in the future if required.
I can do personal messages for your own layout on request but this will involve 
a small fee, please contact me to discuss and if you do find the soundscapes
fun please also consider a small donation to keep me motivated.

Caution:- Don't use the soundscape pages from a mobile device unless you have 
a large data plan or can connect via WiFi as some of the sound files are VERY 
large and there are several of them.

The idea behind starting these pages came to mind when I was playing with my
DCC sound equiped N gauge locos, great sound from the trains but the rest of
the layout was dead, so with that thought in my head I mused on how to get the
addition of sound to the various areas of a model railway layout - easy it
turns out - just put blue tooth speakers in buildings or hidden in the scenery
and then direct the sound via a web page such as these!

Why not use a tape or other recording? I hear you ask, well that sfine as a 
start but it's going to just be the same every time where as the soundscape
project can produce both specific timed events plus adding random played sounds
such as dog barks, door slams etc. giving a more natural feel to the overal
effect.

So after many hours of playing around I've come up with this ambiance generator
which not only enhances my model railway but might well also be used to augment 
such things as war gaming layouts or for small theatre backgrounds - I also 
find it quite nice to have some of the country backgrounds running while I'm
at the computer doing other work as it's quite relaxing.

Small layouts might find that 1 soundscape running is enough where as large 
layouts may benefit from several different soundscapes being used at once.  As 
the basic system works from your devices internal clock therefore several 
soundscapes running at the same time on different devices should not clash i.e. 
church bells ringing at the same time more or less depending on how the devices 
clocks are set.

Many of the sounds are duplicated across the different selections but default
volumes and schedules will vary.  For example the church clock in the cottage
will be set low as if at a distance where as the same bell sound in the church
will be full volume.  Combining 2 selections may add depth to the sound on 
larger layouts.

The automatically loaded schedules will provide 'time of day' related sounds &
can be enhanced with "push to play" individual sounds provided in each sound
scape page.  For example the pub will have location based background sounds
but voices will be added during opening hours & needless to say things might 
well get a bit more lively in the evening!

I'm always working through these schedules & scripts to add sounds & events, do
let me have any ideas for further soundscapes & sound clips you feel might
fit in.

Note that the automatic sound schedules take a few seconds to kick in & catch 
up with real time when first loading.

At start up time is linked to your system clock but you can adjust the 
'schedule' time to any time of day to suit your mood.

I'll be adding differing era sounds over time so things like helicopters wont
appear in 1920's backgrounds.

Extra 'live' sounds can be added from the tables by clicking on the links when 
the scripts are running.  Volume can be altered by the + / - buttons & sounds
set to loop.

Now enable your speakers, select 1 of the links below & lets go or just play 
with it on your PC, smart phone or tablet!

This system has been tested on an I5 Pc with 8GB RAM running Windows 10 64 bit,
machines with a lower specification have been tried & did not appear to have 
any problems.  Likewise Windows 11 systems should work fine but as yet not had
a chance to test this and not expecting any snags with it.

Firefox 96.0.2 and Brave are my prefered browsers which I do most of my testing 
with but Google Chrome, Opera and Microsoft Edge also work - should be no 
problems with other modern browsers that fully support HTML5.  See the user
guide page for more browser details.


Microsoft have dropped support fo Internet explorer and as such no longer works
 with these pages.

Android phones and tablets should be fine as a platform for the system, Brave,
Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera and the Samsung browser seem to work fine.

I'm currently testing with Android 11 on a Samsung galaxy S21 running Android
11.0 and a Lenovo tablet - previous Samsung phones and Android versions back to
8.0 seem to have worked well.

The user guide page contains full details of browser support so far and detals
of any settings you may wish to adopt to allow you to get the best fromthe
Soundscape project.

If any Iphone users are out there can you give me feedback please.

Please send any feedback or bug reports to :-

If you would like a custom designed group of sounds please do drop me an email
so we can discuss if it's possible & if it will have a price attached.

A big thanks to all the people who have spent hours gathering the various 
sound clips used on this site, most are from Freesounds.org.  I'll be adding
a full list detailing sound sources later and will contact the various people 
soon.

These pages have been tested with Firefox 86.0.1 running on Windows 10 and
Firefox on Android 10.0 - it should run on many other platforms but they are not
tested yet - feedback welcome.

Although  the sound clips are largely in the public domain these pages are 
Copyright to Martin Murdoch 2017 - 2021.

I can be contacted at:-

These pages should be fully accessible to those using various access 
technology, they were developed using the NVDA screen reader & a braille
terminal being controlled by BRLTTY software.

Do let me know of any access problems as this is a priority to me.