I built something useful! Meet Instaudio

AKA Cimylium for music.
Occasional electronic musician with a synthesizer obsession, programmer by day.

Age 33, Male

Software developer

Joined on 1/12/08

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I built something useful! Meet Instaudio

Posted by Mich - May 20th, 2013

EDIT: 6 years on, I've decided to shut the site down. Reasons: cost, abuse (copyright-infringing content, bulk-downloaders), threats of legal action regarding the copyright-infringing content that I nonetheless always took down in good time upon receiving notices, dealing with spam. Thanks for all the love over the years, it's been cool.

---

TL;DR: I made this: Instaud.io - quick and easy audio sharing for audio producers (music producers, singers, musicians, voice actors, sound designers...)

Over the past few months I've been working on a simple website for super simple audio file sharing. The target audience is musicians like you and me, who like to frequently share bits of work in progress on social networks or over IM, to get some feedback before finishing the final product and uploading it to the NGAP, SoundCloud, or what have you.

The main objective is to make it quick and simple, and I like to think that's what it is right now.

All you do is drag a file onto the page (or use a conventional upload button), wait for it to upload, and you get redirected to a very simple page with just a big audio player, under a short URL.

You can click on the progress bar in the player to advance to somewhere in the file, just like you would with any audio player. The difference is that the URL updates to include the time point you've selected. This lets you link to a specific point in an audio file, which makes it all the more useful for feedback.

Here's an example of an audio page: http://instaud.io/t

(That's my attempt at playing a simple version of Requiem for a Dream, but I digress.)

You don't need a user account or anything, you just get on there, upload your file, and you're done.

You have the chance to delete the file again as long as you don't close your browser. If you still need a file deleted after that, you can use the link in the footer.

I am continually working on improvements and new features for this thing; if you want to stay up to date, you can do that through Facebook or Twitter.

I hope y'all find it useful!

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PIED3 2013-05-20 10:12:48

Neat!

Mich 2013-05-20 10:12:48

Thanks!

Phyrnna 2013-05-20 11:44:06

Nice! :D

Mich 2013-05-20 11:44:06

Thanks!

Labraxadores 2013-05-20 16:16:52

I'm just going to make you notice a small problem: I tried to upload Glorious Morning from Waterflame, and then opened a new page and gone rummaging through some websites. When I came back, the download time counter had reset to 1. It continued doing this almost every time I switched from the page, and sometimes shown me an "server cannot be reached" error.

I'm using Chrome, and my internet connection is fine.

Mich 2013-05-20 16:16:52

What do you mean by download time counter? Do you mean the upload progress indicator?

BenTibbetts 2013-05-20 16:31:37

Neat idea. Thanks for creating and sharing this.

Mich 2013-05-20 16:31:37

Glad you like it. :)

SonicWombat 2013-05-20 16:46:00

Awesome, man. I was getting tired of having to upload sound bips to tinypic. You're a gentleman, and a scholar.

Mich 2013-05-20 16:46:00

Happy to know you have a use for it! Thanks for the compliments.

Turd 2013-05-20 18:10:45

Wow, this is great. Definitely will be using this

Mich 2013-05-20 18:10:45

Very happy to hear so many people have a use for it! :)

StaticBlu 2013-05-20 18:43:24

Wow And the day has been saved thanks to Mich. Take that Superman!

Mich 2013-05-20 18:43:24

Cheers! :)

AndyOfTheArcticDucks 2013-05-21 05:03:41

Bookmarked with the force of a thousand suns.

Mich 2013-05-21 05:03:41

Woo!

Quarl 2013-05-21 17:54:29

I can't wait to use it to share dick jokes with sessile.

Mich 2013-05-21 17:54:29

Like this thing an as yet unidentified person has uploaded? http://instaud.io/3

Quarl 2013-05-22 12:15:11

Dude... that was better than any dick joke I could have come up with...

Mich 2013-05-22 12:15:11

It's pretty intense.

ksthultz15 2014-05-18 00:20:54

Aha. So youre the mastermind behind this. I use this all the time. Literally, every time I start one of my dozens of WIPs to share with my friends/other producers, it goes there. Great great site :D

Mich 2014-05-18 00:20:54

Glad it's useful! :-)

ADR3-N 2015-03-11 20:22:48

This is really cool. How did you manage it?

It would be much more useful if you could easily find the authors of tracks, but I like the interface. Random audio produces some nice surprises. :)

Mich 2015-03-11 20:22:48

Thanks! Web development is a long-time hobby turned into a career, so I had the necessary experience to build something like this.

If you're interested in nerdy details: It is built using the Ruby on Rails framework, uses the gem "CarrierWave" to deal with uploads, and archives uploads older than a month to Amazon's S3 file hosting service.

I have plans for introducing public profiles so you can browse through someone's public uploads on there (if they set it up), but I need to find some time for it next to other unrelated projects.

Random audio is fun but can be dangerous for your ears. :p

ADR3-N 2015-03-12 05:50:29

Nice! Probably wouldn't hurt to run a little ad revenue on the side at some point. $3 a month isn't much but over a course of years it'd probably help to expand more if you had some $$ coming in. Never know. You might get huge. :)

Mich 2015-03-12 05:50:29

It's received slow but steady growth since its inception; people seem to be telling their friends. I do it all on the side of my job, so there's little time for it in my life presently.

If it keeps growing and costs too much to reasonably pay out of my own pocket, I'll look into setting up an actual business for it and making it pay for itself though. :)

AeronMusic 2015-03-31 17:27:56

Didn't know you made the site. I use it on a regalur basis and I love the lay-out. It is very usefull indeed. Thanks!
Seems like it could be hard to grow since I see a lot of producers use clyp.it or any other audio sharing site than instaud.io. Anyways keep it up!

Mich 2015-03-31 17:27:56

Glad it's useful to you. :)

I haven't spent any money advertising it, so it's only growing by word of mouth. It has grown a lot over the past two years despite that though. :)

Thanks!

ChronoNomad 2017-09-13 10:12:10

I had no idea you were the genius behind Instaudio, but many thanks! It is truly exceptional audio resource.

Mich 2017-09-13 10:12:10

I don't think there's anything particularly genius about it, but thank you! :)

legendary-frog 2017-10-18 15:20:54

Love the site, didn't realise the person who made it was a member of this forum. Well done dude!

Mich 2017-10-18 15:20:54

Thanks! :)

LucidShadowDreamer 2019-08-25 10:25:32

This was an amazing site that I used a lot. It's a shame that you have to shut it down, but I understand the situation. Thanks for all these years of making mine and many other's lives easier!

Mich 2019-08-25 10:25:32

Thanks for the kind words Lucid <3

I built something useful! Meet Instaudio

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