Are there any software-oriented licenses in the same spirit as CC BY-NC? I'm aware that it likely wouldn't be a true Open Source license if you completely prohibit commercial use, but I've looked for a license like that in the past and didn't have any luck
The GPL is pretty close and still true Open Source. The GPL is technically closest to CC BY-SA, but the virality of the GPL (or especially the AGPL if you like/trust it, which I don't but that's a longer conversation) has been enforced enough that a lot of companies, especially smaller ones with fewer lawyers are wary of it/try to avoid it, but even a lot of big companies with many lawyers can be very conservative about how they use or don't use GPL software.
But yeah, both FSF and OSI see some commercial use as a freedom a Free/Open Source license should have so if you want a truly non-commercial license both will tell you it is not by definition a Free/Open Source license.
He mentions in an earlier blog post [0] that the audio files are behind Cloudflare already so if Cloudflare did its job so I think the actual bandwidth impact on the origin server should have been pretty limited. Hopefully he'd turned on the option to ignore the query string to avoid the cache being bypassed.
I run a similar audio-heavy site [1] that's reached the front page of HN, also behind Cloudflare - the traffic spiking to terabytes a day is a bit of a shock at first but if everything's configured properly CF works well
Really neat! If you're interested in adding clouds to your basemap I built a service [0] which generates free, almost-live cloudmaps (with alpha channel or precomposited onto a Blue Marble image) as part of my own ISS tracker project
That's really cool! Starred so I can find it later, might be challenging putting it on the esp32 but if there's an easy way to downsize the images then it should be do-able. Thanks!
I had a quick look - it's sample-based (eg organ has 4 preloaded samples, http://terpstrakeyboard.com/web-app/sounds/organ440.mp3 plus 110, 220 and 880Hz variants), and different notes are created by adjusting the playbackRate of the closest sample
It's also all just vanilla JS which probably helps keep it snappy
It's actually surprisingly hard to get iOS Safari to keep playing audio with the screen off.
When I made https://ambiph.one I ended up having to route everything through a MediaStreamAudioDestinationNode to trick Safari into thinking it's a livestream, which is apparently the only type of audio allowed to play in the background
The solution I found after approximately two months of struggling with this problem: you have to generate an audio file that is a few seconds of silence, play it on a loop, and play it at the same time as the actual audio file you want to play (via separate audio elements, or an AudioContext). Specifically I believe you need to make sure the silence is “playing” at track boundaries for the real audio, so there is never a single moment where your webapp stops playing audio.
Ohhh that's interesting, so the root cause for my workaround working might be that the "live" audio node that I stream everything else to effectively never stops
I have been able to have multiple streams on iOS, but not easily. GarageBand might be able to do this via imports, but I’m not sure it it lets you queue/play multiple samples simultaneously like it will on macOS iirc.
If you are playing music through Spotify in the background, foreground audio in Snapchat still plays normally while recording and playing back just recorded snaps, as well as snaps or memories you have prepared earlier. Sometimes you need to start playback on Spotify again via Control Center, because Snapchat steals focus or takes priority for audio output or something, but it is just part of the jankyness of this workflow, which is probably not intentionally designed to be used the way I use it. If you combine these quirks with Screen Recording, you can make simple audio loops by recording simultaneously via Snapchat and iOS Screen Recording, then use those videos as uploads to Snapchat to stack the loops over each over by selectively queuing them, with audio from a video in Snapchat playing at the same time as audio from Spotify.
It’s kind of a weird workflow, but it’s neat that it works. It feels intentional, as most apps stop background audio playback when starting recording on the same device, but at least Snapchat does not do this, so it’s at least technically possible.
Hey Matt! I've been a fan of Ambiphone for a while and I see your comments on HN surprisingly often. I've been trying to build a different web audio player with inspiration taken from yours. I haven't figured out the screen off audio thing, so thank you so much for sharing this demo!!!
Thanks so much, that's really cool to hear! Let me know if you ever hit any more problems, I've been meaning to blog about a bunch of problems I had to work round in various browsers but haven't got round to it yet, so happy to answer any questions
This is really cool, thanks for sharing. I've got a couple of pseudo-radio stations on https://ambiph.one/ which are very roughly synchronised for all users but it's based on their device clock so it can get a couple of seconds out of sync very easily. Looking forward to picking through your code to see if there are any techniques I can borrow!
> If your work isn't ready for users to try out, please don't do a Show HN. Once it's ready, come back and do it then. Don't post landing pages or fundraisers.
If you like this kind of thing (as background ambience or whatever), the 'WJSV broadcast day' recording from 1939 is worth checking out too: https://archive.org/details/001WakeUpMusic
