[sealo]

Hi guys, thanks for the comments, I'm Neil the guy who made the site.

Long time lurker on HN but never posted hahah, felix is correct I am trying to gauge interest in the project as to whether to keep working on the site, so by signing up with your email I can 'A' justify to my fiance I should keep working on it and 'B' let you guys know who are interested when I push new features etc :)

@Difwif yes you are correct the loop is short currently, the reason I did this is obviously to keep bandwidth down in this initial period and to just qualify the idea,

@davidism, If people show interest I will be adding longer audio and also different varieties of rain, hard rain, thunderstorms, light rain, rain on water, rain on tin roof.. you get the idea aka i'm rain crazy

Any suggestions/criticisms are welcome, thanks guys - Neil

[mb_72]

I'm someone that uses rain / rain + thunder / waves on seashore sounds to help sleep - it's quite noisy where I live and these sounds mask outside interference - but I can't see myself moving away from the mp3 player (Cowon J3) solution I use to this website. The main reason would be the mp3 player does just the one thing I want, i.e. playing the sounds, and this is very power efficient; I wouldn't want to leave my PC / tablet / smartphone running this webpage.

Also, an mp3 player allows me to loop or create a playlist, for example with 'heavy thunder' at the time of night when I need the most noise-masking, and with 'light rain' when I need the least.

Finally - and, yes, I realise I might sound a bit kooky here - I want to be able to select my own loops and samples. Some mp3 sources for rain I've found on the 'net have lots of aliasing noise, and I simply can't sleep as my mind focuses on the artifacts rather than just drifting away.

A couple of the above points (especially the 'timed program' one) might be able to be addressed by your implementation. And while I think I'll stick with my implementation for now this is because I've already done the 'hard work' of setting something up; for 'beginner' or occasional noise-maskers, your site is a quick and easy solution. My suggestion, then, would be to focus on this group as a target audience. Good luck. :^)

[pavel_lishin]

> Some mp3 sources for rain I've found on the 'net have lots of aliasing noise, and I simply can't sleep as my mind focuses on the artifacts rather than just drifting away.

I wonder how many people would find it soothing.

[sealo]

@mb_72 I do exactly the same when sleeping mate, phone with 30min rain track on loop for masking noise ;)

I agree for now the target user is a quick fix audience, but in future who knows!

[chubs]

Please: let me buy high quality 256k mp3's of all this to put on my ipod. If i could buy enough so that i'd never notice repeated tracks, i'd love it.

[ChrisNorstrom]

http://whitenoisemp3s.com/sounds-like/rain

They're $10 each but totally worth it. Pure, no human sounds, and over an hour long each. The woman who records them is a professional and her recordings are used by various industries, from film to video game developers.

[chubs]

Thanks, great site!

[sealo]

It is something I am considering working towards chubs, if you head to the site and drop your email in, or just shoot me one direct I will keep you in the loop with developments.

[basicallydan]

Hey Neil

Very cool - I'm a big fan of rain too, it helps me sleep every night.

I don't suppose you've considered the possibility of setting up some kind of live feed of rain sounds from places in the world where rain is very common? I think that'd be interesting. Obviously, no feed would be 24/7, and setting up the infrastructure for this to work would be a lot of hard work and probably a bit more costly, but it would be super cool, huh?

[sealo]

Hi basicallydan, yes that would be super cool, I have been thinking about how to get rain from around the world etc, I agree that would be awesome :)

[anigbrowl]

You don't need rain samples as such; you can synthesize rain very effectively by running white noise through a vocoder, which is just one array of bandpass filters + envelope followers controlling another array of bandpass.

[sealo]

very clever, my brother played with this type of effect in flash a year or so back, but I think because I knew it was fake it just wasn't the same hahah.

[robin_reala]

A transcode to Ogg/Opus would be nice for Firefox.

[sealo]

I'll put it on the list :)