Chill out, listen to some rain | Hacker News Reader

Chill out, listen to some rain

raining.fm

131 pointsandrewfelix79 comments

There's a jquery plugin out there somewhere that loads the full width background image first, then fades it in. I think it would suit you much better.

Honestly, it's a nice site, but with only a 30 second loop of rain I am very disappoint. Your competition is http://www.rainymood.com and http://www.naturesoundsfor.me . If you're worried about bandwidth ditch the background images, minify all of the code, and extend the rain sample as it's the most important content of this site. I'd rather have a single image for the background and a longer loop sample, than a shorter loop sample and multiple background images rotating.

@ChrisNorstrom, Thanks for the advice Chris, we will definitely need to refine some things now that people have shown an interest.

Perfectly cool, but like others here I'm curious how you're going to "out do" RainyMood.com. Personally, since they added the "recommended song" feature, likely in response to people so often comparing songs to couple with it (especially The Fragrance of Dark Coffee as I first saw on 4chan), I can't think of much.

I think the changing images are nice, but I think you'll need to do more. Starting with making everything except the image invisible after not moving the mouse for say, 10 seconds. Second, and while larger, better, consider using gifs instead. Up to 1920x1080, looping gifs of rainy scenes. I'll bet you could find some people to help you with that if you wanted. Let one load up, then cycle to it. I think that alone makes you look like a "premium RainyMood".

Maybe if your sound is procedurally generated, maybe adding interactive parameters like "size of rain" (size of field to sample), "amount of drops", "location" (city, rural, forest, lake), and then thunder variables. Let users set up parameters and share them with hashed urls a la "raining.fm/r/fdDiOd4dfji". And if you do use "location", then try to match the images to that.

@jeffool, definitely some great ideas there thanks for the suggestions, a few of which I have knocking around in my head already ;)

I certainly have plans to take it far beyond it's current state and that of anything else out there.

Thanks again!

One suggestion, Volume slider. I like to play the rain behind actual music.

Definitely necessary. For the time being, I dropped these into the console:

document.getElementById('audio1').volume = .5

document.getElementById('audio2').volume = .5

@fumar ok cool volume slider added to the list, thanks.

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

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.

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.

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

I'll put it on the list :)

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. :^)

@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!

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.

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.

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.

Thanks, great site!

> 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.

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?

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 :)

Is the only difference from http://www.rainymood.com/ the lack of thunder?

In my opinion rainymood is much better than this. After listening to raining.fm it became quite obvious that it's on a very short repetitive loop. Rainymood is a much longer loop and actual feels like you have your window open on a rainy day.

Another bonus point for RainyMood comes from the daily music suggestions. They even choose music from video games and anime. I've found out some great tunes from them. Example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMnrl0tmd3k

Wow, the comments in the html source there really has quite the attitude.

Yes those source comments are pretty full on hahah, especially for a relaxing site, but thunders not my thing nor "Gundam Seed Destiny - Theme of Rain".

I do agree, but they were probably written in the constant annoyance of people copying the sound file when he first started. (The site was much simpler. As I recall you could find the mp3's location listed simply in the source.) So attitude? Yes. But with that context, I get an annoyed attitude.

Internet Download Manager automatically rips the .mp3 file from RainyMood with ease.

Rainymood.com is great, and definitely better.

I especially like their notice at the top of the source html.

| Sorry if all that sounded snarky. But seriously, there are lots of great business ideas out there. Find something you love, and do it better than anyone ever dreamed. You can't lose with that formula!

http://simplynoise.com/ is also worth trying.

Nice, I love the oscillating brownian noise.

How about this part? "Just look at the code below - do you really think you can understand it? Of course not."

What kind of a presumptuous ass puts something like that at the top of their source? Tailored Music, Inc. does.

You left out the obligatory "Being A C--t In Your Source Code" warning:

view-source:http://www.rainymood.com/

That just makes me think "what a loser"

@sealo I love the raining.fm site, definitely a neat side project. You could just start selling white noise audio through the site for affiliate commissions, if you focus on getting people to visit the site. Or make it into a simple app with one function and sell that via the site..

Never changed my opinion about a site this quickly.

"Just look at the code below - do you really think you can understand it? Of course not." Dick.

@josscrowcroft, I am definitely keen on developing the app to deliver the best rain experience possible for people :)

Pompous dick-head spotted. Besides, talk of IP is not welcome on the part of somebody who embeds infringing material on their page.

From the source:

DO NOT COPY THIS WEBSITE.

If you copy this website, Tailored Music, Inc. will find out.

Just look at the code below - do you really think you can understand it? Of course not.

Can you find all the places where it contacts outside servers to report its location? Nope.

Hey, do you know about trademarks? "Rainy Mood", "RainyMood", "RainyMood.com", and "Rain makes everything better" are trademarks of Tailored Music, Inc. That means it's against the law to impersonate us or to make products that use our trademarks.

Sorry if all that sounded snarky. But seriously, there are lots of great business ideas out there. Find something you love, and do it better than anyone ever dreamed. You can't lose with that formula! -->

My favorite part of his code is: `// This is stuck in an "eval" in an attempt to hide it from executing until later.'

If only Javascript had some way to call a function after a delay or event...

Chill out, go outside, and watch the meteor shower. http://www.nasa.gov/connect/chat/perseids_2012.html

I did that this morning at 4 am and coincidentally, it was raining...

I turned it on for a few minutes... Eventually it began to sound like sizzling bacon.

I read this comment ... and it started sounding like sizzling bacon in 20 seconds.

Now I'm hungry.

Are you hungry enough to make fryingbacon.fm?

gold

Oh man, I was about to take you up on that challenge ... but .fm domains are stupidly expensive.

Very nice. I love the rain and use the White Noise app set on Rain on my phone every night to help me sleep.

Just one thing, I am not sure how dropping my name and email will contribute to more features? I know you say you're not going to spam me, but it seems like you're just collecting emails to selective email me other things I might not be interested in.

Hey, I didn't create the site. But a friend of mine did. He did this in his spare time. The email thing I assume is a way of gauging support and maintaining interest. I think he wants to be able to tell people about added audio etc.

I'll get him to comment on it further.

Gotcha, that makes sense and is legitimate. Sometimes I get so jaded about people collecting my name and email for no reason that I forget that there are perfectly okay reasons to request it.

I personally have never heard of rainymood.com, but I did find this site pretty neat. There is probably a lesson here that it isn't "X already does this, why are you?", but that it there is likely room for more than one variation on the subject.

Great website!

Visited this on my Nexus 7 and got a message saying it doesn't work because mobile devices don't support the audio tag well. But they do support the Web Audio API! So why not use that?

@primigenus I will look into that, thank you!

The need for noise of nature is ultimately solved by http://www.naturespace.com/ already, with their mobile app. The collection of over 80 different tracks, grouped by topic (thunderstorms, rivers, etc) is amazing. Every track is about $1-4, though. That app is the only thing which allows me to sleep in the night and work productively.

Heh, one of the few things I miss about the east coast after moving to SF is the rain and thunderstorms.

Funny but true I moved to the East Coast after living in Los Angeles all my life and I love the rain storms. But the Los Angeles rain storms last longer. In New York city the rain seems to come in short spurts. Once in a while we get a good rain storm. In LA it would rain for days sometimes and I really enjoyed those days even if they were few and far between.

I can't if it's either audio skipping or a bad loop, but it hops about every thirty seconds or so.

@damncabbage, that is no good, can you tell me what browser and OS you are using mate? see if we can't get that sorted for you :)

Chrome 21, Ubuntu Linux (11.10).

(I don't mean to send you on a wild goose chase. Sorry about that.)

I like the sound much better than RainyMood.com.

Kinda weird feedback, but I actually find the images with people in them a bit stressful. When I think of enjoying some rain, it's from a cozy dry spot. Being where those people are just looks uncomfortable. :)

@exogen I am thinking of perhaps categorising the images, so the user can view categories or shuffle all, eg, nature, architecture, people etc also adding pause so you can sit on your favourite slide.

This is awesome. I find myself so often wanting some sound just to give me a sense of flow while I work and music can very often be too disruptive (I guess it's too exciting sometimes and not constant enough). Rain is perfect!

Have you ever tried out some ambient? Music with lyrics and a lot of electronic beat-driven stuff can be too complex and distracting while I work, especially if the problem itself is complex. Ambient always seems to do the trick though!

Check out Tim Hecker and Jon Hopkins. Also Aphex Twin has a couple albums of ambient work that is great for coding.

I would like to add. Janus, Brian Eno, Bark Psychosis, Stars of the Lid, Steve Reich, and Steve Roach.

http://janustrio.bandcamp.com/

I really want to use something like this but I can't trick my brain to believe it's real and I become anxious.

Anyone else like this or have an explanation?

Love it, it's oscillating between quiet and loud rain a little too quickly for me, is there a way to leave it level/even?

A follow up message from the better half:

"I love that sound

It always helps me sleep thanks you :) "

Oh no, we get so much of it here (Vancouver, BC), this site actually made me hurt reminding me of what's to come.

Quite nice.

Next time I'm in west indies I'll make some samples. Their fat raindrops on top of metal roofs is quite pleasing.

For some reason, that rain doesn't sound real to me. Is it procedurally generated?

is there some way to get different kinds of rain? Rainymood only has one loop. I don't want to listen to the same kind of rain every time; it's not realistic.

A site with 10 different rain samples would be nice.

@intellegacy yes that is what we intend to do, have different rain types :)

Thanks but all this 'summer' all i've needed to do is open my window.

cant beat the real thing ;)

I seriously needed this, thanks. Anyone have tips on how to focus?

Stay off HN. Stay off Twitter. Stay off RSS feeds.

I use Clementine music player (Ubuntu). Go to Extra|Rain.

thanks. gonna leave this on tonight.

@pud perfect! I knew there were others like me!

i like more http://rainfor.me

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