An office with "library rules"

Re:An office with "library rules" by coroxout on Monday December 10, 2012 @05:59PM (#4902013)

I can filter out people talking (as long as they're not listing numbers when I'm also doing numerical work) but get driven insane by little noises like repeated sniffing, foot-drumming, or even one coworker with a particularly squeaky scroll-wheel whose job seems to be to scroll through log files at high speed all day. The first two of these seem to cut through any music I put on headphones, too.

So for me a "library rules" office would just mean fewer conversations to drown out the little noises that nobody even realises they're making. I'm sure I unknowingly make some variety of noise that someone else hates too.

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Re:An office with "library rules" by MattRogish on Monday December 10, 2012 @09:01PM (#4902703)

Many open-plan offices, if you can't switch to private offices, install white/pink/brown noise makers in order to help mask such sounds. They're not too expensive, try getting your employer to install em:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/20/science/when-buzz-at-your-...

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Re:An office with "library rules" by surrealize on Tuesday December 11, 2012 @12:31AM (#4903180)

I use sox sometimes:

sox -t sw -r 44100 -c 2 /dev/zero -t alsa pulse synth pinknoise vol -9 dB band -n 800 1200 fade q 5 30:00 10

It's filtered pink noise; last time I checked sox didn't have a brown noise generator.

Edit: what do you know, I just checked the man page again, and sox does now have a synth brownnoise option. You can play with the "band" parameters (or omit it) based on your local noise spectrum.

Edit 2: you can also use the "bass" and "treble" filters instead of "band"; the former are easier to understand IMO. It's been a long time since I read the sox man page; it's crazy how much it can do.

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Re:An office with "library rules" by tedmiston on Wednesday December 12, 2012 @12:47AM (#4908840)

Thanks for the introduction to a curious tool.

I tried your command on OS X but changing alsa to aiff but nothing plays. Any suggestion?

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Re:An office with "library rules" by surrealize on Wednesday December 12, 2012 @03:58AM (#4909266)

I worked out that command line years ago, and I don't even remember what it all does. And all of my machines are linux, so I can't test out what it is for OS X. But from looking at the soxformat man page, I'm guessing you might try replacing "alsa pulse" with "coreaudio".

You can also look at the output of "sox -h" to see what audio device drivers your sox has.

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Re:An office with "library rules" by coroxout on Tuesday December 11, 2012 @04:21AM (#4903769)

Thank you! I'd never heard of sox and it looks potentially useful and a lot of fun to play around with.

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