

The sound of GitHub - treskot
https://choir.io/player/beachmonks

======
gberger
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.

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

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

~~~
cortesi
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.

~~~
nwh
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](http://i.imgur.com/mu6Jr2o.png)

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

------
alexdong
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/intro/choir.html)

[http://beachmonks.com/posts/explained/choir-
explained.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...](http://beachmonks.com/posts/interviews/timely/that-siren-sound.html)

------
Void_
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.

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

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

[http://song-of-github.herokuapp.com/?username=ajacksified](http://song-of-
github.herokuapp.com/?username=ajacksified)

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

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

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

~~~
alexdong
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.

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

------
CrLf
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.

~~~
alexdong
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](https://github.com/goldfire/howler.js/pull/62)

~~~
trycatch
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?

~~~
alexdong
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.

------
benjojo12
Is there any possibility that we can also hear the small projects?

~~~
alexdong
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.

------
joezhou
Perhaps use drum set sounds?

~~~
cortesi
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.

