The sound of GitHub | Hacker News Reader

The sound of GitHub

choir.io

56 pointstreskot26 comments

I'd use it as background noise at work if it wasn't for the sudden alarm sounds for issues.

I also couldn't click to change the sound set: the popup thingy disappeared when I tried to click it.

Was quite relaxing to watch until a huge crowd of foghorns rocked my apartment.

It does, admittedly, feed my desire for pretty realtime data.

Apologies! The demo is tuned to be way more intrusive than a real-world data stream would be. Our theory is that if we have people's attention for 15 seconds, we should show them the full range of sound intrusiveness. Hope it wasn't too startling.

Not at all. More hilariously maritime than actually irritating.

A minor bug report though; if you toggle playback on and off quickly you can end up with double/triple notifications for events — http://i.imgur.com/mu6Jr2o.png

Thanks for the heads up. We'll track that down.

if we have people's attention for 15 seconds, we should show them the full range of sound intrusiveness

Great behind-the-scene thinking. Alarming, sound for issue still made a nice connection in the brain. We have an issue, its software, but its real. 'Houston, we had a problem' feeling. Funny. Should be less alarming 'in production' for sure.

Fantastic project. Themes of sound pollution, ambient sounds, silence, hearing, listening (inside your head included) are much overlooked (!) stuff. And this modality is a very powerful one (as all the others).

Reminded me of http://onesquareinch.org/ and myriads of other projects, people attentive to sounds, recording them, sharing them. Universe in itself.

Apologies for emotional tone, just some quick thoughts.

We're looking at the sound set bug right now. Also, see my other comment about the intrusive sounds. We plan to have some demo streams tuned for real-world use (i.e. not as alarming) soon.

A bit more background on this project for those curious minds:

Aldo and I each wrote a blog post on why we are building this:

http://beachmonks.com/posts/intro/choir.html

http://beachmonks.com/posts/explained/choir-explained.html

We've been slowly onboarding brave alpha users. We want to learn as much as we can from these early adopters, and plan to share our results in the form of short interviews published on our blog.

The first of these - with Ryan Baker of Timely - is up now.

http://beachmonks.com/posts/interviews/timely/that-siren-sou...

You know how computer always makes some sort of sound in a Hollywood movie? I always liked that.

And from all software with sound effects, this is the closest to useful. Good job.

Small suggestion - please load all resources over HTTPS, including the gravatar images. :)

At first I thought you meant The Song of Github, which is also really cool.

http://song-of-github.herokuapp.com/?username=ajacksified

Very nice. I was expecting angelic voices, but the click, pop thing is nice too.

Neat concept, but browser sound support seems ... dodgy...

Ipad: no sound; Firefox 24 on android: instant browser crash; Chrome on android: finally works.

Audio support on mobile devices is ... shitty. You're right that there is no sound on iPad but weirdly enough, iPhone+Safari seems to work, at least last time I checked.

Our focus in the next 2-3 months is on the desktop clients. We'll release a OSX desktop app next week, then a Windows app after that. Mobile is crucial in the long run but unfortunately we can't do much until the browser vendors provide better support for playing sounds.

Why not a mobile app before a desktop app then? It would allow you be everywhere.

What's up with this trend of doing stuff that only works on Chrome? On Firefox this works for a minute and then stops working.

Hey, that's not quite true. ;-)

I wrote most of our javascript on firefox. My firefox has no add-ons except the Firebug. Could it be one of your extensions? Have you tried refreshing it? Which version/OS?

We use howler.js to play the sounds. I have to say that I was a bit surprised to find Chrome/Safari/IE can play mp3 but Firefox plays ogg. I even had to submit a patch[1] so that howler.js can work on firefox under some weird edge cases.

[1]: https://github.com/goldfire/howler.js/pull/62

I tried Linux x64/FF23 and FF Nightly on a clean profile, and both leaked insane amounts of memory on this page, hundreds of KiBs per second. Interesting that according to about:memory, memory used by tab with choir.io stayed stable, but "heap-unclassified" grew uncontrollable. Bug in Firefox?

This is fascinating. Thanks for sharing.

My gut feeling is that those leaks are the "socket connections" that Firefox hasn't garbage collected yet. The demo you are seeing is using long poll so there might be some good number of socket churns.

FWIW, WebSocket support is high on our priority list. We just need to find the time to implement that.

Firefox 23.0.1 on Windows here. No extensions other than Firebug 1.12.1.

Roger.

I'm running Firefox 23.0.1 on Linux, everything is fine.

Is there any possibility that we can also hear the small projects?

We chose neutral, low intrusiveness sound for the small projects. If you listen carefully, you should be able to distinguish the quick and light taps. It's much faster than the other sounds. The text stream will move too fast to be readable if we also display the contents from the small projects.

Perhaps use drum set sounds?

There are so many possibilities. A few weeks from now, we should have the ability for users to create, edit and share their own soundpacks.

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