"Today's selection is something a bit different for Free Sample Friday. This is the first proper "field recording" I've made on my recently acquired Zoom H2. While it's true that rain is hardly a rare occurrence here in Seattle, getting it this time of year is pretty strange. (We just tell people it rains here year round to keep the tourists away...)

As this recording is over 5 minutes long, I've provided this in MP3 format instead of WAV in the interest of not killing my bandwidth, but it's at 320k, so it still sounds quite nice. Note that this is normalized, but sounds much nicer and more natural at low levels, as the real sound itself does. In addition to the sound of the rain falling, you can hear the constant drip of my gutter as well as a few nice stereo drivebys of cars passing on the street. I didn't add any fancy fades or anything, figuring the original file as is would be more useful. Try taking shorter loops of the rain fall portions and putting them behind your favorite pad sound, or using the car drivebys as transitions in your next track, or better yet, bring a portion of the sound into a program like Absynth or Alchemy and use it as the start to entirely new alien sounds. Hell, just loop it and throw it on a CD as something to help you fall asleep at night. Enjoy! Compress archive weighs in at just under 12MB."

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