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samwillis
Info here: https://mobile.twitter.com/MattEason/status/1560772439713452...

The gist is someone submitted a FOI request for the audio of the Scotrail announcements, it was published, now someone made this with it. Love it!

reaperducer
Interesting that he had to FOI the audio.

Tokyo Metro sells its station jingles and announcements on a CD in its gift shop.

I loaded a bunch of them into my iPhone and use them for ringtones.

_HMCB_
Can they be bought online?
bobthepanda
actually sampling them and distributing them would be another matter entirely.

even public entities aren't always super carefree about their trademarks. Transport for London and New York's MTA are two public agencies that vigorously defend their trademarked and copyrighted design materials.

[deleted]
(comment deleted)
_HMCB_
Every now and then life rewards you with something unexpected and perfect. This is one of those times.
matteason
I made this! Thanks for posting it, I'll gladly answer any questions.

The samples are available here on GitHub: https://github.com/matteason/scotrail-announcements-june-202...

...and here on Google Drive: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/172W6sXnvlr7UcNLi...

We crowdsourced transcriptions for all the clips and Simon Willison built an interactive dashboard to explore them: https://scotrail.datasette.io/scotrail/

The announcements are read by voice-over artist Alison McKay: https://www.alisonmckay.com/

teh_klev
This is excellent Matt. Have been following the activity on Twitter this week and it's been a lot of fun.
skruger
This will be the new soundtrack to my life. Many thanks, Matt
jcynix
Nice, but neither produces any output in Materialistic (Hackernews reader on Android) nor the Duckduckgo browser. Does play in Google Chrome. All on Android 11.
noSyncCloud
Works fine in Glider (HN app) in WebView on Android 12
pingiun
do you sync up the announcements with the music? it kind of sounds like it's synced somewhat
matteason
No, it's completely random! After each announcement ends there's a random delay of between 0 and n seconds, where n is 15 by default but adjustable with the 'frequency' slider. I think you just end up with bits that sound synchronised because they happen to fall on the beat
CamperBob2
Awesome. Sounds like the Sons & Daughters lead singer, but more, well, ambient.
FujiApple
My new favourite “Reason”:

Sheep on the railway (1067)

ThePadawan
I'm fascinated that these (ostensibly internal) reasons are actually broadcast.

Coming from Germany, I'm used to the reason for a train delay being announced as one of

- "people near the tracks"

- "waiting for another delayed train" or

- "operational issues", which ...yeah that includes everything else

It's kind of charming that delayed Scottish people get to bond over yesterday's theft of overhead line electrification equipment.

3dbrows
We also have a lot of infuriatingly tautological explanations, for example:

“We apologise that this train has only 2 carriages today. This is because the additional carriages failed to enter service.”

Well, yes.

opan
On mobile if I change app focus away from my browser, the train samples continue, but the YouTube part stops.
matteason
Yeah - unfortunately YouTube really, really want you to pay for YouTube Premium so they don't allow videos to continue playing in the background. Sorry about that, I know it's annoying. There's nothing I can do about it for YouTube but I'll look at adding alternative music sources like SoundCloud
kadoban
In Firefox there's a browser extension to stop youtube from doing that.
amaccuish
Now all that needs to be done is make this into a radio station for Sonos. Sunday sorted.
kratom_sandwich
Reminds me of youarelistening.to which is ambient music + police radio
mhd
I'm getting a "Dr Blair, Dr Blair, Dr Jay Hamilton, Dr Jay Hamilton..." vibe.
xbar
Sweet Matt.

Maybe a master volume slider soon?

Dr_ReD
LOL! The first time I tried it, there where no announcements Because U-Block was blocking something, and I waited, and I waited... :)

Much better now though, with the announcements. Very soothing.

The only thing missing is the thick Scottish accent I was expecting. ;-P