[Nazo]

For generating pink noise, anyway, Audacity (probably the most popular free sound editor) just generated an hour of pink noise for me in 18 seconds, which doesn't seem too long to me. You can also do what HeadInjury said and loop it if you don't have enough space. Play it 100 times in a playlist or something.

The main thing I do with it (whether you agree I should or not) is burn-in. For that I like to do four hours of pink noise followed by a bit of silence to help ensure I don't push them too hard while burning in. That makes looping it require that I use at least relatively large files or a lot of small files... I should point out that most MP3 players -- particularly cheaper ones like what I'm talking about using -- don't support playlists of any sort.

The time it takes to generate the noise is a non-issue for me though. Generally speaking, one only has to generate the actual noise files once in a blue moon. I don't even remember how long it took, though I do believe it was more than 18 seconds on whatever program I ended up using. I would have been ok with it taking 18 minutes as long as I could leave it running in the background or something though. My biggest concern was just in getting the noise in the first place since I had to search all over the Internet through a bunch of programs that claimed to be able to do it but which were commercial with limits or that sort of thing. I didn't know Audacity could do it, but I must admit I don't use Audacity much, so I guess I'm not surprised that I couldn't find an option to do that when I tried looking without really knowing where to look.

However, if I could come up with a way to make it compress better, then it would be even easier to make a backup (in fact, if I could get it really small I could just stick it in an e-mail to myself or something lazy like that, lol.) Part of why I'm wondering about the idea of using clean sine waves instead of random noise is the fact that the resulting sound would probably compress exceptionally well even in a lossless format (and better still in something such as MP3.) I think lossy compression would work a lot better with it as well. Lossy formats like MP3 don't like noise very much, but a set of plain sine waves (even they shift around or something) would probably be exceptionally easy and compress to a very tiny amount.

In any case, if i were to put my mind into completely reinventing something, i wouldn't exactly start with pink noise.

Sometimes even if the wheel is round, reinventing it isn't necessarily a bad thing. For example, when they went from wooden wheels to rubber ones, I'd say it was a positive change. If they'd just left it as-is, we wouldn't be able to go very fast at all even on the highways (apparently around 70 MPH or so wooden wheels rip apart.) I think this would be a positive benefit for the uses people have for pink noise (whether or not you specifically agree with those uses, the fact remains that people do that.)

I'm not saying I want people to sit around and dedicate their lives to this or something though. I just wanted some input on the idea of putting sine waves together in a more ideal fashion than just tossing a bunch in and expecting that alone to be good enough.

 

[andrewberge]

I think the Clip+ supports playlists, after rockboxing it, anyway.
 
I believe in burn in, too. I think it has much more of an effect on certain models than others, though, and i think it's effects are often highly exaggerated.
What i meant about pink noise though is... Well, you compared it to the wheel. The thing is, it's not the wheel. It's more like having fancy cushions in your seat. It's not even necessary for everyone.
You can burn in headphones by just using them as you normally would. Leaving your headphones on with music speeds up the process (ordinary seat). Using pink noise is like having a fancy cushion. It's a matter of convenience, of comfort.
 
What i meant was that if you're going to spend time trying to improve something, you should spend it on something that actually is comparable to a wheel, such as the drivers.

 

[Nazo]

Oh no, this isn't to show off to anyone. Lol, who would I show off to saying "I have a better pink noise!" This is just simply what it is -- making a better pink noise so that I'd have a better pink noise. If it's akin to getting nicer seats in a car, well then maybe I'd like seats that don't hurt so much every single time I drive.

 

[Tilpo]

I highly doubt whether it even matters what sound you use for burn-in. I think burn-in, if it exists at all, happens by 'loosening up the driver'. In which case a 1Khz sine wave would do just as well as music, white noise or pink noise.
I once did try burn-in and I did it by playing Merzbow, which is essentially just random noise.

I also wonder: what exactly do you think is wrong with pink noise? Isn't the very definition of noise that it's random? So what exactly is wrong with combining a huge amount of random signals and then equalizing it such that there is an equal amount of power in each octave?

 

[Nazo]

I highly doubt whether it even matters what sound you use for burn-in. I think burn-in, if it exists at all, happens by 'loosening up the driver'. In which case a 1Khz sine wave would do just as well as music, white noise or pink noise.
I once did try burn-in and I did it by playing Merzbow, which is essentially just random noise.

It probably doesn't matter. That's part of what I was saying with this. However, it probably does still require a bit more energy than just a single 1KHz sine wave would produce. If the goal is loosening something after all, then playing considerably less sound through it should have considerably less effect.

Why specifically 1KHz anyway?

I also wonder: what exactly do you think is wrong with pink noise? Isn't the very definition of noise that it's random? So what exactly is wrong with combining a huge amount of random signals and then equalizing it such that there is an equal amount of power in each octave?

See the above posts for the answers to this.

 

[Nazo]

EDIT: Sorry, accidental double post. Do end users not have the ability to delete their own posts here?

 

[Tilpo]

It probably doesn't matter. That's part of what I was saying with this. However, it probably does still require a bit more energy than just a single 1KHz sine wave would produce. If the goal is loosening something after all, then playing considerably less sound through it should have considerably less effect.

Why specifically 1KHz anyway?

I think it's more about RMS than it is about waveform complexity, and RMS is independent of frequency. But I don't know the exact science behind burn-in (does anyone?)

Why specifically 1kHz? Because it doesn't matter what you use, and 1kHz is a tone that is used very often for test purposes, so why not for burn-in?

 

[kingpage]

You don't need to make one. There is a 24bit/48kHz 10 minutes worth of pink noise available here (and white and brown noises too)
 
http://www.archive.org/details/TenMinutesOfWhiteNoisePinkNoiseAndBrownianNoise
 
I actually convertd it back to 16/48kHz flac for burn-in myself. It will let 22-24 kHz frequencies have some workout too, with no treble roll-off.

 

[Nazo]

Er, how does this do anything for the problems mentioned before? Also, very few DAPs actually support 24-bit audio, relatively few support 48KHz, and very few support FLAC.

Personally, I don't worry too much about > 22050Hz ranges. Even if the frequency of the audio used has some effect (and I'll admit I don't really think it does so much as I think that there's no reason not to use something of this nature when one isn't really sure) the greater majority of the music most of us listen to won't have been mastered in any way that it can really do above that on its own. (Surely even the vinyls wouldn't really be going that high? If nothing else, would the equipment being used to record it all actually go that far? I have to admit though, I end up not really being able to ever get anything I listen to in vinyls regardless, so it's pretty much 16-bit audio whether I like it or not.)

 

[Head Injury]

Quote:

Er, how does this do anything for the problems mentioned before? Also, very few DAPs actually support 24-bit audio, relatively few support 48KHz, and very few support FLAC.

Then encode it at 16 bit depth, resample to 44.1 kHz, and compress it as an MP3.

 

[Vipa]

does it really make a difference or is it all in the mind?  are your ears really that sensitive?

 

[Nazo]

See this thread for my response to that: http://www.head-fi.org/t/579928/can-the-burn-in-skeptics-leave-us-alone

 

[RazorJack]

 
Quote:

vinyls 

 

 
 
 
 
Good luck with your pink noise perfection quest, though.