Day Sleeper Sound Loops

I got sick of wearing earplugs when I sleep during the day. I mean, for what they are, they’re OK, but after 4-5 hours, they start to ache inside my ears, and inevitably I pull them out in my sleep.

Of course, I usually sleep like a rock the first 4-5 hours of my sleep. It’s during hour 5-8 that I’m easily interrupted, and if I get much less then 7 hours in a night, I’m grumpy and stuff. Closing doors doesn’t work because I’ve got noisy kids and whatnot.

I started to price out noise machines as an alternative. Oy, veh! $100-$200 for most of these things! And really all they are is a glorified cheap-o radio with a little playback chip loaded with some loop-able samples. I thought, “I can do better than that!”

So after a great deal of monkeying arouund the other day, I came up with this: a relatively short, not-too-cyclical brown, white, and rain-noise combined loop which seems to do an excellent job at masking most common household sounds. I turn on my laptop, set it beside my bed, and turn on Winamp to loop it. For those not used to Winamp, there’s a little button to the right of the “shuffle” button which turns on looping.

Oh, but one tweak to Winamp to make it loop smoothly (without this, there’s a gap as it loops):

Go to Options:Preferences Plug-ins:Output Pick “DirectSound Output” Click “Configure” button Go to “Buffering” tab Drag “Buffer-ahead on track change” to some reasonable value. I set mine to 500ms. Restart Winamp.

Then the playback is perfect on the noise loop 🙂 No glitches.

I’m thinking of doing some with thunder, louder rain noises, nature sounds, and such. I can’t stand actually having music looping going when I’m asleep, though, as I tend to concentrate on the music and have trouble sleeping.

Here’s the loop: noise_loop1

Let me know if you could use something different. A little time spent with Cakewalk Sonar goes a long way 🙂

(Keywords I was looking for in a product that would do it before I invented my little do-it-yourself solution: sound masking, noise generator, white noise, brown noise, pink noise, rainfall, etc.)

I just realized that basically what I’ve done is turn my $1600 laptop into a $140 noise box. Yay me!