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.
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.
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
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. :^)
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
@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..
<!--
RainyMood.com
Copyright (c) 2008-2012 Tailored Music, Inc. All rights reserved.
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!
-->
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
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.
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 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!
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.