Soundwalks along real recordings

A soundwalk is an ordered list of real recordings — a route through places you can listen to. The Walks tab (key 5) shows the walk on its own map with a line from stop to stop.

Open a template walk

Go to Worlds and scroll to Soundwalk templates:

• Soundwalk: Bourne Woods through the year — five morning recordings from one wood in Lincolnshire, April to December, all by the same recordist,
• Soundwalk: Berlin to the Baltic — six recordings from cranes in Berlin-Spandau to the Świnoujście lighthouse.

Press Open this soundwalk. The app switches to Walks. Both templates were made from real Wikimedia Commons files; their notes only restate what the file pages say.

Read the walk

Under the name and Notes you see a summary such as “6 stops · Route: … km (shortest paths on the WGS84 ellipsoid between 6 located stops) · Listening time: …”. The distance adds up the shortest paths over the Earth’s ellipsoid (geodesics, the same calculation as RavingDesk’s geodesic distance tool) between the stops that have coordinates, in order — it is not a walking route along roads.

Each stop shows its title, licence badge, author, length and coordinates, a note field and buttons: Play from here, Move stop up, Move stop down, Remove stop and Source page.

Listen

Press Play the walk. The stops play one after another; the current stop is highlighted and selected on the map. Stop the walk ends it. Playing a walk does not change your scene.

Build your own walk

1. Press New soundwalk and give it a Name.
2. In the Explorer, press Add to soundwalk on a recording. Choose the walk (or New soundwalk), optionally write a Note for this stop, and press Add stop.
3. Recordings you saved earlier can be added under Add a saved recording as a stop at the end of the list.
4. Reorder stops with the arrow buttons; write notes about what to listen for.

A project can hold up to 20 walks with up to 40 stops each.

Take the walk with you

• Download walk list saves a text file with every stop, your notes, the source links, the totals and a credits block with one attribution line per recording.
• Add all stops to the scene turns the walk into layers in the Studio, for example to mix the five Bourne Woods mornings into one long dawn chorus.
• Share the whole project with File → Share link… — the link contains the walk with its references and notes, never audio.

On the map, Tab to the walk map and use the arrow keys to move between stops; Enter jumps to the stop in the list.