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Comment by audiosampling | Hacker News Reader

Hi Guys! I am the developer of the myNoise website and just want to say that all your comments are a great source of inspiration today: many suggestions for further improvements will be taken into account! Although I did entirely code the website by my own using a simple text editor, I am not a programmer, in the sense that I never learned how to program efficiently and beautifully. Multiplatform issues, and mobile browsers in particular, are driving me crazy ;-) And yes... I feel a bit "naked" now as some of you are digging into my website code with much expertise. Please be indulgent! ;-) Cheers, Stephane

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This is truly one of the best noise websites I've come across, especially for cabin noise with that deep rumble that helps me focus. Seriously, thank you for creating this! This has had way more thought put in to it than anything I've come across to date.

Great job, I've been listening to the soundscapes for a while. Just wanted to point out that the title tag at http://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/tripOfMindNoiseGenerator.ph... is misspelled - 'od' for 'of'.

Thanks for making this!

Great site, but the generators are pretty CPU intensive. Is it the nature of Web audio API, or just heavy computation in your particular case? kmix is really overloaded in KDE when the generator is running (using PulseAudio).

Amazing work! I'll definitely visit more often, these are great.

Minor quibble: the "Binaural Beat Machine" does not produce binaural beats. It plays two notes at the same time, to both ears, which produces an actual beat in each ear (pull off one headphone - you can still hear it). A nice example of how it should sound: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binaural_beats

It does combine both, as to work without headphones, but if you wear the headphones, you will have the binaural thing on top of the modulation. Two for the price of one ;-)

Thanks for doing this, I'm going to use this page a lot, I think. But have you thought about open sourcing some, if not all of the code? With the source code out on for instance github, a lot of people could help you out wherever you feel your own skills come to short.

If it were me, I'd not open source this. Common tools that are used to build other things generally are, such as a compiler or VCS, but an actual finished product, not so much. Open sourcing this would be like Github open sourcing github.com, rather than just a handful of common tools they built to create github that might be useful to others.

Open source has a time and a place, but some things, like finished websites, are best left proprietary. There's a lot of thinking that's gone into this site. I think the #1 thing that would happen as a result of open sourcing it is that other people would just take the her work and creating clones, eroding her ability to make money from it (if she so chooses).

Choosing to open source something should be done only with a compelling rationale, and the downsides should always be carefully considered.

As a big proponent of open source, I would agree your statements completely. There is little a community could do with this that can't be done with existing tools already. Furthermore, this succeeds primarily because of the author's specific execution of the idea and the way it is presented. Open source just risks a "too many cooks in the kitchen" scenario.

Furthermore, because of the high quality, someone is extremely likely to turn this into a paid mobile app and make money off of it (irrespective of the license it is released under-- unscrupulous people don't care about pieces of virtual paper).

I used a white noise generator app for a long time with my first child and this is far superior to what I had. I would have gladly paid several dollars for a solid mobile execution of this.

You made many valid points! Thanks for sharing these.

Sorry, I misread your name as Stephanie instead of Stephane---I didn't mean to call you a she instead of a he!

Only if the goal of the site is to make money. If there's no profit involved there is no downside to open sourcing it.

Not true. You might not want to make money yourself but you also might not want other people to rip your work off and profit from it.

People that open source things do so as a gift to the community at large, and sometimes people just don't want to give away their property (intellectual in this case), even if they don't intent to turn a profit. Plus, leading an open source project can be quite stressful and there's also the time cost of actually supporting a community of people, if they gather around a project.

There are tons of downsides to open sourcing something but occasionally there's a significant benefit (or other motive) that drives the decision to open source and outweighs the negatives.

Very insightful and totally right. Thanks for sharing your opinion.

Well, he could opensource the audio components, especially the multiplatform/browser bits.

Let me think about it... Not sure about all the implications of releasing this as open source, in particular the investment in... time. I wish I had 48 hours in a day.

Truly impressive and wonderful, thank you. I have one request - please add more thunder! Or the ability to create more rumbling low rolling thunder noises.

The site is fantastic - and the aesthetics of the background pics you chose are very well done.

Quick suggestion:

A "mute all" button. I like having multiple layers of sounds open at once. Sometimes I need to mute them to watch a video or something, and it's a hassle to go through muting each one.

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