Spotify looked to ban white noise podcasts to become more profitable | Hacker News Reader

Spotify looked to ban white noise podcasts to become more profitable

bloomberg.com

305 pointscududa489 comments

I think all these comments discussing white noise miss the point, which isn't white noise but "if people would listen to what is more profitable to us, instead of what they enjoy listening to, we would make X more profit".

They couldn't even have gotten to the point of confusing white noise and leaves rustling with podcasts and other "content" to make a buck off, if it wasn't for that first step. And that view of users as a resource, as people who need to be told what they want, permeates so much of tech... like a giant elephant shitting all over an otherwise quite elegantly made couch.

Something that stuck out to me during my time in college business courses is the fact that many teachers are pushing the idea of a manager, director, or other executive roles, into how to understand and allocate resources. One of the resources is humans, either as employees or, in other moments, the users. While clients and investors are more or less seen as another team or "entity"(eg, partner company) that facilitates the use or funding of the project. Just my two cents on what I have seen being thought to the next generation. I don't know how to feel about this. I am interested in others' opinions on this.

A previous article about management styles kinda goes in the direction you're describing:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37159338

Reception wasn't great to say the least.

But what’s driving people listening to white noise sometimes isn’t enjoyment, right? There have been cases of clear abuse [0] that Spotify is correct to crack down on.

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2014/5/7/5690590/spotify-removes-si...

> "if people would listen to what is more profitable to us, instead of what they enjoy listening to, we would make X more profit".

I was ranting, immaturely, to my ML educated friend recently about how terrible modern discovery algorithms are ("if ML is so powerful why does Spotify exclusively serve up the steamiest of dog sh$t?") when he explained this to me.

His response was "they aren't optimizing their discovery algorithms for your enjoyment, they optimize them for profit."

Another good example of this is Apple’s “radio station” concept. It plays deep cuts unrelated to the originally chosen music about 3 songs into your list to spread the wealth (play songs with the smallest possible royalty costs).

Things like this are super annoying to me, especially when Apple is engaging in it as well. Just like deduplication on cloud services, this "feature" is literally only beneficial for the company so they can reduce your file storage use and make your data less secure and have an excuse to get to know more about your data they can use for other purposes.

is it what dropbox did back in the days eh? ))

I imagine they mostly all do it, with the exception of maybe Tresorit, possibly ProtonDrive but I am not super familiar with them. Its actually a "feature" of convergent encryption which Apple uses in lieu of true zero-knowledge e2ee like Tresorit.

> this "feature" is literally only beneficial for the company

Is this actually true? I don't know. I don't think consumer file hosting services would be viable at their present price points if they were storing every single file byte-for-byte.

Certainly some of the value capture belongs to the company, but if you're not particularly concerned about security it seems like a win-win.

If you are concerned about security, encrypt your files and everyone else with deduplicated files will subsidize the cost of your service.

It's not that they were simply smart and didn't de-duplicate identical songs; at some point they simply replaced instances of various recordings of songs with a single one. I could not be further from being an audiophile, yet I still understand the anger this could cause. Even at a basic level, there can be relatively major differences.

I don't think this has anything to do with de-duplication.

It's likely referring to iTunes Match which is a paid service that allowed you to upload your own MP3 files to Apple who would then serve it to you alongside any purchased/streamed music.

I believe that by default (but able to be disabled) your songs would be "upgraded" to the master-quality equivalent in Apple Music if they were identical. But then over time artists have been replacing those song with different versions/mixes.

> Just like deduplication on cloud services, this "feature" is literally only beneficial for the company so they can reduce your file storage use and make your data less secure

Every distributed object store I've ever seen takes your data, chunks it into a fixed size, hashes it and then distributes copies on multiple nodes.

So deduplication is intrinsic to the architecture and not some business decision layered on top.

All the big players also take kickbacks from record labels for pushing selected artists. Essentially hit song astroturfing

This is called Payola.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payola

It’s illegal, but only for radio stations. Spotify et al are free to do ”product placement” deals all day

https://artists.apple.com/support/1124-apple-music-insights-...

Apple pays the same rate to everyone and for all music, and for what it's worth it is well known that Apple pays much more than Spotify does to artists.

It is incredibly difficult to guess what related music people will like, and some people will like the selections, others won't. Apple recently added a "Discovery" station that tries to guess music you might like but don't listen to and I am a big fan of it, while many others absolutely hate it. Eh.

> if ML is so powerful why does Spotify exclusively serve up the steamiest of dog sh$t?"

Has popular sentiment turned against Spotify’s algorithms? I thought their recommendation system was their most-respected feature – in my own experience at least, Discover Weekly continues to be Spotify’s moat.

I have pretty diverse music taste, and Spotify's discover weekly is nearly universally bad for me. My wife's taste is less broad, and hers is much better.

I listen to a wide range of music and Spotify's recommendations had been really good for me. But more recently they have gotten terrible. It's really annoying and has made the service much less useful.

I recently switched to Tidal, and decent recommendations are what I miss the most. While I prefer getting music recommendations from an actual person with similar taste, Spotify was generally good enough.

That's more than can be said for Tidal. My recommendation playlists generally contain tracks and artists I already listen to (sometimes from completely unrelated genres), sprinkled with what seems to be random tracks from the "more like this" section of said artists.

Still not enough to compensate for the shit stream quality and ever increasing price of Spotify though...

Ever increasing price? In the US and much of Europe, one price change since launch.

My range is pretty broad as well, and over all I'm extremely happy with Discover Weekly. It's probably my primary vehicle for finding new music today, honestly. But it does seem to be pretty hit or miss for other people, for some reason.

Lol what. Spotify has always been subpar on recommendations. Their moat is their brand, catalog and users. Discover Weekly is not even remotely a moat, it's trivial for anyone to make something similar or better. For me, discover weekly gives me less songs that I like than just turning on a good old radio channel

It's far too hidden to be their main feature. For a completely new user, it's not promoted as such. It's at best one of the many colourful "tiles" you can click on.

I've never noticed Spotify's recommendation engine is very good, but I came from Pandora.

What drives me absolutely bonkers is the number of foreign language songs in Spotify's recommendation engine for me. No matter how many times I say "never play this song again" to every foreign language song, give it about 5-10 more songs and it'll play another one.

I've never knowingly listened to a foreign language song

Cool story, but your friend knowing the answer has nothing to do with his ML education, I suspect, but with his business savvy. I say this because I used to work for a company in the online ads space; they were all knuckleheads but all of them would've told you the same thing.

They should then just have a “gold” version which does an optimal job for the end user.

https://Last.fm connects to Spotify and can give you a bit more of an independent set of suggestions

Inevitably what ends up happening in these situations is that some product manager thinks, "wait, what if we had a 'gold' version that people payed for and that version also pushed whatever content we wanted at them?"

> "they aren't optimizing their discovery algorithms for your enjoyment, they optimize them for profit."

Still in 2016, I could start with a song in genre X and then let Spotify autoplay for hours staying in genre X. I discovered some new bands I liked. Then circa 2017 or 2018 something changed. After a couple of songs, Spotify would switch to genre Y, and break my flow.

I stopped paying for Spotify, and switched to Youtube, then Youtube Music. Youtube Music still does the good old thing, plays random songs staying within the genre I started with.

Maybe Spotify is optimizing for profit, but my money they lost.

If you listen to some songs off track it will ruin the recommendation engine for a long time with Spotify. E.g. child music is the most obvious one. Having a party with people choosing songs ruins it.

So in practice it is not very user friendly since you can't pause it.

There’s incognito mode for Spotify to avoid ruining your recommendations.

Don't ruin my rant ;)

Spotify should still be able to realise when something completely outside of the normal is played. Maybe as a different listening mode, eg "Kids party" - and keep them separate.

Sometimes breaking the flow with something else the user enjoyed, for variety, keeps the user more engaged.

But this behavior should be controllable by the user.

Yep. I think this is something that they could seriously improve on - not blending all usage scenarios into just one.

I had no idea this existed, nor would I know how to turn it on from Google Home / Alexa, which is my primary consumption method (particularly in "party" circumstances).

I'm not sure this is a good solution; it violates multiple UX principles around the ability to undo, to see what a program is doing. It's also bundling a lot of stuff together in an unintuitive way: "Incognito" (or as Spotify seems to call it, "private") listening doesn't signal that it has anything to do with recommendations, and if you turn it on I believe it also does things like block social features.

I don't think "private mode" in applications is a good alternative most of the time to more direct controls like:

- An opt-in mode for training the algorithm.

- An ability to after leaving a phone on overnight to clear a bunch of songs out of your recommendations.

- An ability to mark a song that you like as irrelevant without blocking it.

- An ability to import and export recommendation lists and then to "pause" or "freeze" your recommendation training.

- An ability to freeze/fork/revert your recommendation profile.

- The ability to have multiple recommendation profiles.

- etc...

Going into a special mode to preemptively avoid a program from acting unpredictably and doing unpredictable things is bad UX, we should just call it bad UX. One of the big reasons that bad UX exists is because companies aren't using recommendation algorithms to benefit the user, and so they don't want users to be in control of them or to be able to easily turn them off or tune them. The recommendation engines are there to push Spotify's interests even when those interests don't align with the user. Bad UX and bad recommendation controls are in some ways a feature for the company, not a bug.

If the recommendation engine was presented in a way that consumers could easily control and if the majority of even casual users felt confident interacting with it and regularly turned it off, then that would be treated as a software defect to be fixed. Modern recommendation UX has more in common with advertisements or the popups websites put in front of content to force you to make an account, in the sense that you're not really supposed to take advantage of any opt-outs that the companies begrudgingly supply.

The problems you describe are why anything "algorithmic" is hated in some circles, despite there (IMO) being value in it in theory. People just can't imagine it ever being good because in reality it almost never is.

Also you can right-click a playlist and select "Exclude this from musical profiling" (translated from my native language). I did that for many older playlists I'm no longer into, and this seemed to cause a significant steer in weekly recommendations which have since turned to be much more in line with my current tastes.

> I stopped paying for Spotify, and switched to Youtube, then Youtube Music. Youtube Music still does the good old thing, plays random songs staying within the genre I started with.

Perhaps only until they get the market position they desire...

FWIW, that's why I left.

People always like to figure a conspiracy. It is very unlikely Spotify is optimizing their discovery for profit. Their algorithm is one of their primary selling tools and while it isn't unheard of for brands to fuck their goodwill to increase profit, I just don't see it happening here.

"prohibiting future uploads while redirecting the audience towards comparable programming that was more economical for Spotify" — this sounds like Spotify generating the white noise on device or partnering with an app that does so, which seems like a much better use of resources then letting users upload thousands of GB of machine generated audio per week streamed to hundreds of thousands of viewers. I don't think there's much indication at all that the goal is stopping people from listening to white noise and forcing them to listen to other podcasts. And i don't necessarily think they'd be wrong in assessing that this is a very poor use of bandwidth costs, or wrong in thinking that it's one that significantly changed the marginal economics of the platform (auto generated white noise can be uploaded in bulk by computers with no human involvement compared to the time it takes to create even the most bare bones podcast episode, and one "episode" of white noise is indistinguishable from a another for most users, leaving Spotify holding the bag for thousands of hours of back catalog that may never get listened to)

why does a white noise podcast need more than one episode? that's no different than uploading the same episode hundreds of times. it's an attack. except worse because noise is incompressible

In short, white noise is not just one pitch of "TV static". There can be many pitches in white noise, and also many other types exist: brown noise, pink noise etc. It also can be mixed in to provide an audio experience. Human mind is excellent in recognising patterns so if one is using it for sleep/anxiety reduction purposes, it needs variety. This is why a noise generator producing nature sounds never work, but a fan does.

This is what enshittification looks like. It's gotten to the point where I only play specific albums I like now. Spotify hates that, as evidenced by how difficult the UI makes it to do.

How is that difficult? I'm wondering if you have a different UI to me, because I can both search an album and then play it, click on the album art from a playing song, or if I want just pin an album and then it behaves like a playlist

I use it on the Tesla screen which to be fair is widely reputed to be a terrible Spotify UI.

> as people who need to be told what they want, permeates so much of tech

all under the disguise of 'objective and smart algorithm analysing data' even though it seems that they will always use data to fit their own need, it feels like a digital feudal system

> it feels like a digital feudal system

it surely does.

and quite an interesting take on the declaration of independence of cyberspace.

I'm a bit shocked in a way.. there's a principle about large central structures that apply the same no matter where. Any central service will be biased toward his own belief and enforcing absurd pain on smaller users ?

not entirely sure what you are saying?

nevermind i'm not sure what i'm saying either

like a giant elephant shitting all over an otherwise quite elegantly made couch.

This is a weird reference! Do you, mayhap, have large, boisterous, disliked relatives?

In case you need it, a static page which will give you an infinite amount of white/pink/waterfall noise: https://www.quaxio.com/noise.html

No tracking and no ads, ever.

Uses WebAudio API. Based on the code from https://noisehack.com/generate-noise-web-audio-api/, but for some reason, the code wasn't working as-is in today's browsers. So tweaked things for a couple minutes.

Can it be used as a good source of random numbers or is the noise not truly “white”?

Under the hood it’s just making calls to Math.random(), so the white noise generated is exactly as reliable a source of randomness as the system as the system could give you directly.

It’s at at most as good of a source but almost certainly worse. Lots of entropy dropped and biases introduced.

Very fair point. Transforming the randomness to fit it into the audible spectrum would certainly have side effects

>as reliable a source of randomness as the system as the system could give you directly

Not sure what you mean by this. Which system?

I thought that was the point GP’s comment is making, but a reply to a parallel comment to yours suggests otherwise.

The combination of the operating system (Linux/MacOS/Windows) and the particular hardware it has access to. With different hardware, /dev/(u)random has different qualities of entropy.

JS’s Math.random is not a system (or CS) RNG, and a few years back it was barely an RNG at all: https://medium.com/@betable/tifu-by-using-math-random-f1c308...

So no, Math.random is very much not

> as reliable a source of randomness as the system

that's horrifying. I do slightly disagree with the final thoughts and works say that one of the xoshiro 256 generators is probably better than the 1024 ones. 256 bits of state is plenty to give you a longer cycle length than you will ever need (even considering birthday paradox) and the reduced state means it fits in a single cache line

After the linked article as well as https://jandemooij.nl/blog/math-random-and-32-bit-precision/ which follows from it, the main three browsers (Chrome[0], Firefox[1], Safari[2]) actually switched to Xorshift128+. So these days Math.random is nowhere near as horrifying as it was back then, however it's still not a system or a userland CSPRNG, for that you need `crypto.getRandomValues()` (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Crypto/getR...).

[0] https://v8.dev/blog/math-random

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=322529#c99

[2] https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=151641

Math.random() is a pragmatic PRNG with no strong guarantees and implementations vary. Focus on speed. OS can give more entropy if that's what matters

https://v8.dev/blog/math-random

I've seen visual demonstrations of PRNG bias before, but are the biases of typical implementations of Math.random "above the noise threshold" (pun intended) where humans could distinguish them from truly random streams of audio?

I don't think so, no. The way I understood op was to use the generated audio itself as a source of entropy, which would be a bad idea if not using a CSPRNG perfectly tuned to the sampling rate and lossless audio I think :) but I'm just guessing there regarding the effects of quality.

It calls Math.random() which is NOT truly random. crypto.getRandomValues() is what you would use if you wanted truly random noise.

So the question now is, if it were calling `crypto.getRandomValues()` instead, would it sound different?

EDIT:

This is not a 100% joke question. I'd expect both versions to sound the same, but at the same time, there's a threshold on the RNG spectrum between "getRandomNumber() { return 4; }" and some truly random quantum source, where if you feed the RNG to audio output, people will be able to distinguish between "bad RNGs" (left of threshold), and "good RNGs" (right of threshold). I wonder where that threshold falls.

> would it sound different?

I don't believe it would. While there can be pretty bad PRNGs, they are typically implemented to produce a particular statistical distribution which would be identical to a real random source for the purposes of white noise. This is due to the fact that audio is a superposition of frequencies which takes time and multiple samples to cohere.

PRNGs can be bad for things like crypto because each individual generated value has significant implications for the entire set of operations.

It wouldn't sound different, even if you have absolute pitch, whatever the "speed" of the random sounds would be.

Both algorithms will generate sufficiently random values from a human perspective. Unless you carefully look into them, with a very specific mathematics / crypto knowledge, you wouldn't even be able to tell which one is pseudo-random, and which one is random: and if you somehow are able to, then it would just mean that the underlying RNG is very, very bad.

Probably not different enough that you could pick one from the other without a lot of practice, but depending on what PRNG you use, there's a good chance there's repeating patterns at different frequencies in the lower bits. Take a look at the visualisation bitmaps in https://www.random.org/analysis/ - I'd guess there's enough structure in that signal to appear in the 'white noise' as an audible whine.

Oh.

I just sample from my own brain if I want truly random noise.

Ba-dum-tisss...

Good point. You're much better off playing a podcast of white noise, which repeats the exact same sequence of bits each time you hit play.

I’ve used Spotify because I can adjust the EQ to get the tone I want. There’s no system wide EQ on iPhone.

I’d recommend mynoise.net ; most of the sounds are for-pay but white noise and a few others are free, and it includes an equalizer (and some presets for pink noise and etc.)

An app, though, not a website.

The article describes shows playing “various noises like crashing waves or bird sounds on repeat.” That is different from pure white noise.

Another one is https://mynoise.net/, which has a neat mode where the sliders will very slowly move on their own, so you get slowly adjusting soundscapes.

I don't know if it works offline though, and probably not when your phone is locked. They also published recordings on spotify though; some are an hour long, others you can probably download them and loop them though. https://open.spotify.com/artist/1gRJBUyCeihBrgcCtDdEfv?si=yL...

Works fine in background and while locked on Android. Only works when the tab is visible on iOS.

And iOS will stop playing it after the screen locks, unlike Spotify.

They have an app for ios.

This website quite possibly saved my sanity when renting a tiny one bed flat in London with my partner and newborn baby. The traffic noise was unbearable, it was the hottest summer on record and he was a terrible sleeper.

Also, if you donate to mynoise you get some download credits that you can use to get an mp3 of your preferred slider settings. Great option for using it offline and it helps keep the lights on.

> …probably not when your phone is locked.

If you’re using iOS, there’s a built-in system for Background Sounds[0] that has quite a few options, and is built into the OS, which means it definitely still works while your phone is locked, or even otherwise engaged. It even gets out of the way for other audio and comes back very gradually.

A real hidden gem.

0: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212775

This is great! Might I suggest to add an X button to go back to the menu select. As if you accidentally select one on your phone, you have to refresh instead of hitting back.

My baby will love this

Heads up this doesn’t seem to work on my iPhone 12. I confirmed audio on other apps works for me (I’m not accidentally streaming to an earbud or something) but this page doesn’t play any audio.

Turn off silence/vibrate only mode on your phone. I leave mine in vibrate mode 99% of the time, so I expect this to happen occasionally.

Oh that’s weird! My phone will play other audio in silent mode so it never occurred to me that this website would require that to be turned off.

Recently iOS included a native noise generator that bypasses the need for external services like Spotify or websites. It offers six different kinds of noise to listen to on your phone.

It’s in the iPhone control center under the ear icon (which you may have to enable). The feature is called ‘background sounds’.

macOS as well. Though it's not exactly a 'generator'. Even for white/pink noise it's just playing an audio file.

I wouldn’t recommend using it, if it’s really looping. At some point you notice the loop point and wait till it happens.

It's not really the kind of audio that you'd be able to notice looping. The white/pink/brown noise files are each a minute long, and the stream/ocean/rain sounds are comprised of 17-20 sound files between 1-3 minutes long (and I'm guessing it randomizes the playback order).

Iirc Google Assistant has similar.

Unfortunately, people don't want to stray away from familiar apps, Spotify is just too convenient.

I really wish Spotify would understand the difference between white noise and actual music, using Spotify on my smart speaker when I go to bed playing a continual brown noise loop completely screws up the recommendation algorithm.

YouTube has a similar issue. Viewers who watched "60 minutes of white noise" also enjoyed "8 hr tv noise loop". Yeah... thanks for the rec.

My girlfriend's end of year thing was pretty funny. Showed whale songs, white noise, and other sleepy stuff as her top songs and artists.

Hey! 8 hours of TV static per night is the only way I can get some decent shut-eye! But then, I'm from 1950.

Also, the soothing crackle makes transmissions from my home planet more distinctive, so I never miss any of the crucial orders relating to my mission:

https://youtu.be/jjeUuakHsLw?t=29s

Look spotify, I did it for you `if (!song.white_noise) { add_for_recommend_history_(song); }`

In a more serious note YouTube has a similar problem, "Oh I looked recommendations for a drawing tablet to buy my friend", now till to the ends of time I get recommendations for drawing tablets, and if I had used the "Incognito mode" they show me ads despite me being a premium user, I want it incognito but not THAT much of incognito you geniuses at Google.

it would surprise me if they didn’t try to handle this. It is similar to the Christmas music in January problem.

With white noise it is so easy to generate for free that likely 1000s of people are generating hordes of static content and uploading it to try to get a payout.

And it’s probably not that easy to identify every track that is intended to be listened to as ambient noise. Ambient noise itself is a music genre.

Turn on incognito mode on YouTube to watch these videos

Heck I just use YouTube-DL to rip tracks like that to MP3 and copy them to my phone to play directly. That said maybe OP just wanted to vent about Spotify rather than find solutions.

Yeah, I youtube-dl audio tracks to stuff I frequently listen to and they end up in the downloads folder. So far it’s the simplest least invasive method I found on Ios

Yeah there are a lot of 8 hour "music for studying" tracks I listen to (I like the ones which are mixes of music from the halo video games, with a fav being a mix of the ODST soundtrack with additional rain noises), and those are a prime candidate for ripping versus streaming every time, killing the phone's battery and ending up with ads when you are wandering away from your device.

I use the VLC app on ios and transfer music using its wifi web interface, since my computers all run linux and can't easily transfer MP3s to the phone any other way.

I use VLC on iOS as well, but primarily for videos.

There’s the Decoupled app which is pretty neat for playing audio on iOS. You can transfer audio files using Wi-Fi.

oh cool thanks for the tip!

Dude youtube drives me absolutely crazy. I fall asleep to it almost every night watching some documentary or something on say the medieval times or whatever. Specifically a channel I want to keep watching videos from.

Then when I pop up awake at 3am cause of noises youtube's sent me to WW2/Hitler/Nazi videos. It never, ever fails. Sometimes I get sent to this one physics teachers video who I've never once clicked on, watched, or selected myself, but he has an INSANE amount of views like tens of millions. Like, youtube purposely sends videos to him. I forget who it is but it's a dude with long grey/white hair and a beard talking about physics I think from MIT but I dont remember it's been awhile.

Why can't you keep me watching stuff related to what I'm watching?? How do I get from the Teutonic Knights to Hitler?? It's ALWAYS Hitler.

Now i have to make sure I watch a channels playlists because I wind up in Hitler territory every other video if I don't.

> Now i have to make sure I watch a channels playlists because I wind up in Hitler territory every other video if I don't.

Godwin's law

I mean, we are talking about the same genre: history documentaries. And there are plenty of WW2 documentaries on YouTube… so it’s not quite Godwin proper (no one is getting called a Nazi who wasn’t an actual 1930s-1940s Nazi). This is more Godwin adjacent… if you watch enough videos on a loop, you’ll eventually see a documentary about Nazis. To be fair, this is true of traditional cable TV too. There are a LOT of WW2 documentaries, so I don’t completely fault the algorithm here.

turn off autoplay

??? Then I don't get a loop of videos to fall asleep to. Thats the entire point.

If you want a loop why don't you actually set it to loop some rather long video?

I fall asleep to documentaries. I don't want to loop one video. I want to play videos that relate to one another and not go from one topic to one completely unrelated. The only way to reliably do this is to use a playlist, which sucks, because not every channel makes playlists and I'm sometimes fine with the channel changing, as long as it doesn't go from #SpaceScience to #WW2againagaingain.

And then I'd say about 30% of the time it'll grab some documentary/video I've already watched, which is also annoying.

make your own! have you heard of watch later?

At the risk of sounding like a condescending asshole, maybe the problem is your offloading the responsibility of managing your playlist to a third party?

I'm an ancient relic from the nether times who still manages his own locally stored audio files and playlists, so I simply can't relate to this beyond that if you play lazy games you will win lazy prizes.

Nothing wrong with being lazy, of course. But if you want the power to have a satisfactory playlist you kind of need to own up to the responsibility for one.

You don't sound like an asshole, but you do sound oblivious.

There are tens of millions of songs released every week. It's literally impossible to find new music you like without recommendations.

In the past, people would get recommendations from people they know. Now we have the help of algorithms. They're not perfect, but most people will find hundreds of songs from random artists they never would have listened to and their friends/family probably have never heard of.

There's no manual way to do that without spending an enormous amount of time on it (which I say as someone who did that in the 90s/00s).

This. Old fogey over here too, and I would have stopped listening to any new music 15 years ago had it not been for streaming and recommendation algorithms.

I find new music on FM radio. It's free, it's curated, and I can then buy songs to add to my playlists.

The fact people pay money for something already being beamed to their house for free sometimes astounds me.

Most of the music I like doesn't get played on any local FM station - not to mention the constant advertising on radio.

To paraphrase up thread: If FM stations were the only way to discover new music, I would've given up on new music a long time ago. Absolutely can't stand radio or television advertising; I'd much rather listen to nails on a chalkboard.

The FM stations here sound like they got stuck in a time-loop sometime last century. “We sound more like everyone else than anyone else”.

I find it funny that you think FM radio isn’t also run by an algorithm. It is really rare to find a traditional DJ who gets to play whatever new music they want. Maybe from a college radio station, but not from most major market stations.

depends on the station. And someone at this point still listening to FM radio and commenting on the internet probably isn't listening to any of the few remaining major stations.

> It's literally impossible to find new music you like without recommendations.

As another old fogey, at least old enough to have been active in the filesharing scene, that filesharing has got me so much music stored on disk that it would take nearly a year to listen to every recording if they were played back-to-back 24/7. With such an embarrassment of riches, what need is there for continual recommendations for new music? Sure, I occasionally add new music if I come across some interesting mention of an artist in a book or article, but I have a hard time understanding why some other old fogeys feel that a discovery algorithm is essential.

By that logic, what need is there of new books, paintings, movies, TV, or ideas? You can't possibly consume all the good ones already available to you.

You may be surprised to learn that some people just enjoy exploring new and recent music. Music and culture change, so you can't just find everything you might want in a historical catalog.

> You may be surprised to learn that some people just enjoy exploring new and recent music.

I never said otherwise. I just believe that most old-fogey listeners are going to divide their time between exploring new music and dealing with the backlog they quickly accumulate from that exploration, and therefore an algorithm that pumps out recommendations nonstop is not essential.

>By that logic, what need is there of new books, paintings, movies, TV, or ideas?

you may legimatey not need them based on your goals for the medium. For books, I tend to only read technical textbooks these days, so sure. I'm not looking for any fiction or biographies.

Likewise, I really haven't bothered curating a playlist since Google Play Music shut down, I was barely adding new songs to my playlist by then anyway.

>You may be surprised to learn that some people just enjoy exploring new and recent music.

Sounds rough with the current landscape, especially if they feel stuck to Spotify. But if there's one thing I learned from exploring new and recent adult media, it's that the truly great stuff isn't found on Pornhub. You gotta search deep and discover your kinks through "word of mouth". Really teaches you to properly "research" when billion dollar corporations are too scared to touch your medium to begin with, and most forums forbid even talking about such stuff.

and how to rummage through spam. My god, is there so much spam when you hit a niche adult theme and you just end up with weird russsian websites. Corporate propaganda shilling can't even phase me anymore

Back in the Napster days, my "algorithm" was to stumble around somewhat randomly until I found something cool. Then I could look at that peer's collection and download other things that seemed interesting. Usually, it was possible to go deep and get full albums.

After they killed Napster, my discovery ended up on BitTorrent, which often optimized for the complete discography of artists. This could leave quite a backlog but it was interesting nonetheless.

Now I use Apple music, primarily for the albums and the depth of the catalog. I was an early Spotify user but they lost me when they were serving other people music through my connection in the early days, I didn't appreciate that.

When they started monetizing, I also didn't like the way that they took in tons of money from people who liked exclusively small artists and paid it out to mostly the top acts from big labels. Sure, they all do that now, but Spotify started it. At the time, iTunes still had you paying by the song.

It's hard to stay into new music as I get older. A lot of times I already know what I want to hear, and I'm not a constant soundtrack type. But I do make an effort to prowl around the catalog a little and also listen to college radio. Those experiences haven't failed me yet.

If you miss Napster, try Soulseek. There's a Linux client called Nicotine .

>There are tens of millions of songs released every week. It's literally impossible to find new music you like without recommendations.

how many forms of white noise do you really need? It's not really a "genre" people listen to for leisure. It's either for sleep or study. You're not intensely listening for lyrics nor rhythm nor anything other genres argue about, you don't care how the "artist" got the sounds.

If that is true, then most of those releases are inaccessible to most listeners. For example, Spotify only adds around 100k "songs" per day and that includes remasters and mixes of an existing song, no matter how small the change is. For someone who truly wants to pick from all those ten million songs, there isn't even a service that would let them listen to the songs, let alone find them and recommend them.

I’m paying spotify $15 a month or whatever to manage my playlist. That’s an advertised part of the value proposition.

Sounds like you need to break your contract in that case.

For what it's worth, you can pretty easily create your own white/brown/pink noise 24h (or any amount of time) in Audacity[0] it's a generator in the menu.

[0] https://www.audacityteam.org/

YouTube has a similar issue. Viewers who watched "60 minutes of white noise" also enjoyed "8 hr tv noise loop". Yeah... thanks for the rec.

I feel ya. I usually fall asleep at night to some kind of "10 hour loop of blizzard and crackling fire noises" playing on Youtube... and now my YT recommendations are full of "10 hours of crackling fire", "10 hours of thunderstorm noises", etc. suggestions. Sadly YT is incapable of understanding that I only listen to that stuff when I'm trying to fall asleep and I have zero need of those videos any other time. groan

I mean, sure, I can go in and hand edit my watch history to remove that stuff (and I do occasionally) but doing that constantly is a huge PITA. I wish they could figure out a way to fix this.

I have gotten to a point of opening a video in private browsing mode when it's outside my typical interest.

I find myself doing the same, especially when searching for something that I am considering purchasing. I don't need Google, Youtube, Amazon, etc trying to sell me alternatives to whatever I've already made an informed decision on

There’s a website called mynoise that has a bunch of noise generators. No algorithms required.

Nice. I may switch to this for my night-time ambient noise. Thanks for the heads-up.

You can exclude certain playlists from the list of stuff that is considered when creating the recommendations. Tap the three dots on a playlist and tap "Exclude from taste profile".

The same with Christmas music.

> entire episodes of white noise, seemingly aimed at listeners who are asleep.

> Some podcasters are making as much as $18,000 a month through ads placed in these episodes

> shifting users away from white noise programming could net the company an additional $38 million in profit

I wonder what does Spotify think those people could listen to while sleeping, heavy metal? /s

A problem could be that ads in those stream are wasted unless we discover that sleeping people can be influenced as awake ones. Is the sum of those wasted ads that's equal to $38 M?

> A problem could be that ads in those stream are wasted unless we discover that sleeping people can be influenced as awake ones.

"But old clothes are beastly," continued the untiring whisper. "We always throw away old clothes. Ending is better than mending, ending is better than mending, ending is better …'

My guess would be the idea is to shift listeners from white noise that Spotify pays royalties for toward white noise that Spotify owns. The hidden factor is ads that don't actually play for Spotify subscribers. The general idea behind paying for an ad-free experience is that royalties and revenue are either paid by subscription fees or by advertisers. The free tier gets ads and the paid tier doesn't. If Spotify shifted users to content they don't pay royalties for, then users wouldn't notice the difference, but behind the scenes Spotify can claim the royalties and ad revenue for itself rather than pay them out to a third party.

For example, if Spotify replaces the podcaster who makes $18k month in royalties with Spotify's own white noise podcast, then the immediate effect is that $18k/month doesn't leave Spotify's pockets.

This feels like Amazon selling Amazon products on Amazon e-commerce site.

Amazon Basics, then?

Which is to bring up Peak Design, and that whole debacle.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/3/22311574/peak-design-video...

>white noise that Spotify owns

how can you have copyright on white noise???

Maybe they wash it with a proprietary bluing agent.

>unless we discover that sleeping people can be influenced as awake ones

Thanks, I didn't understand what the problem was before, and was thinking "if the white noises still has ads, who cares?"

Anyway, Pandora has essentially "solved" this problem with the "are you still listening?" button that pops ups, so IDK why they don't just do that.

I still don't understand. If people like a background noise while sleeping, they will keep having one, be it chill / lounge / etc ... Music. The issue will remain the same.

but if all the "podcaster" is contributing is white noise, spotify can provide that without paying a "podcaster" anything so as a business it makes no sense to allow it to continue. If you have multiple "podcasters" earning 5 figure monthly off of white noise why pay them if you don't have to?

So I guess no, its not the same.

> I wonder what does Spotify think those people could listen to while sleeping, heavy metal? /s

Honestly, there are days when I go to sleep with metal blasting from the ear buds. That can be calming depending on how the day went.

Some black metal bands are very calming and help me to relax and/or concentrate on whatever activity I am doing - Mgla comes to mind first.

Did you mean Mgła?

Yep!

I can give some insight to this. If you search for white/brown etc. noise on spotify for songs you won't find longer tracks. I use these while travelling if I'm having troubles sleeping in a room where there's noise, or on a plane. Airpods in, lie back and it blocks out more noise. The problem with the albums of white noise are they fade between different kinds of noise which usually only lasts a few mins - this is enough to break the effect. I can only presume there is a limit on song length for albums, because there are white noise podcasts which are 10 hours long - which is exactly what I need for my use-case.

There are bands with songs over an hour long on Spotify. Distrokid (the most popular service for independent artists to get on Spotify et al) has no maximum length for song uploads.

I think the real reason is Spotify pays you per "song played" not per minute played. If I listen to Dopesmoker by Sleep, which is an hour long, then I listen to a 60 second white noise clip, both artists get paid an equal amount.

I don't use spotify but I wondered how a length limit would work for some esoteric bands. Shpongle is another one with extremely long songs that wouldn't work if they were chopped up.

I never thought I'd read about Shpongle in HN.

Hallucinogenics brought me to my current career. Synthesizing DMT got me my first full-time grant writing gig. I believe more hackers experiment with drugs than the nerd stereotype would lead you to believe.

Also, the music they make is amazing. So it's always relevant to most music conversations.

(Albinoblacksheep flashback is still my go to when I'm feeling nostalgic)

that's really cool! I was really addicted to Shpongle and 1200 Mics in the 2000s. btw, Shpongle's song that makes me trip while sober is "DMT" (Divine moments of truth), its fucking amazing (I don't do drugs, I'm really afraid of what can come up).

I don't think I've heard them for at least 10 years, I'll put it on for listening!

Edit: OMG I just remembered the existence of this masterpiece: Shpongle - Star Shpongled Banner !!!

We are here :)

Shpongle albums are split up into normal-sized tracks. Most CD players, media players, and streaming services support gapless playback of albums, at least for subscribers. When a Shpongle album is played with gapless playback enabled, it sounds like one long song.

I don't have a Spotify link handy, but here's a YouTube Music example:

https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_l_K6GgImOp-3...

> If you search for white/brown etc. noise on spotify for songs you won't find longer tracks.

I noticed it too recently, but it's not always this way. A few years ago I could find white noise songs with hours of duration.

Can I ask why you don't use a dedicated app to generate the noise on demand?

I can just hit download on a podcast on Spotify and have it ready for trips.

iOS has a white noise generator built in with several types of noise as well as nature sounds. https://www.theverge.com/23131327/how-to-iphone-white-noise-...

Wow I didn't know that, thanks! Now I just need a way to create an app icon for random iOS settings.

Try the built-in Shortcuts app. It can create pseudo-apps out of many iOS settings and toggles.

There is one already, it looks like a little ear. I get to it by swiping up and it’s next to the remote, flashlight, and calculator app icons.

It is accessible through Control Center (the pull-down screen with radio toggles and brightness and stuff)

(From the link I posted)

There’s a quick way to access all of this if you’d rather not dive into menus every time you want to turn on white noise. Once you’ve set your preferred sound from the options above, follow these steps:

Navigate back to the Accessibility menu. Scroll down to the bottom and tap Accessibility Shortcut (under General). Tap Background Sounds to select it from the list. This will set white noise as your accessibility shortcut so your preferred background sound will play anytime you triple-click the side button, even with the screen locked. You can map this function to Back Tap, too, if you prefer.

For Android users, the Google Assistant can produce white noise, shore sounds, etc.

You should probably use an app though. Noise doesn't compress well, which means that you can get strange artifacts when it is compressed from the server to you, and then from your phone to a BT device. An app playing from hardwired or internal speakers is best.

There is a good app called Chroma Doze. It lets you tune the noise to the exact spectrum needed for your situation. It also blends the noise very well so that there is no loop heard. Plenty of apps/devices think that 3-4 seconds of noise looped is enough, but one you hear it, you can't unhear the loop.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.pmarks.chr...

How is that more convenient than opening an app and pressing a button?

Or having some noise mp3/AACs loaded into your phone's music app?

It can be toggled on and off in the pull down menu, wherever you are. It also detects when something else is playing and can lower the volume to a configurable level (or turn off completely). Other than that I can’t think of any, but I like it well enough that I don’t use an app. I especially like the rain sound, which also happens to drown out voices very well when combined with ANC.

I think the argument is that they already have spotify downloaded and are probably already using it. So why NOT use it? Why bother with a dedicated app?

Spotify is also probably more feature-filled than the average crap app thrown on the appstore for quick money as a whitenoise maker. For example the ability to download or send to speakers (like Sonos, Alexa, for example). Plus Spotify has greater selection of noises (yes there are MANY different types of white noise). Plus you can easily switch to your other podcasts and songs when you want.

I for one am an avid whitenoise listener on spotify throughout the day. I will listen to one type of whitenoise in the morning, then listen to a podcast episode, switch to a different type of white noise for a while, then some ambient noises, maybe some actual music around lunchtime, some more soft whitenoise after lunch to focus, another podcast at the end of the day. Doing it all in Spotify has value. Could I switch apps if I had to...? Sure. But a fully-featured music app is a natural place for long tracks of audio, so it makes sense to have it all together.

>So why NOT use it? Why bother with a dedicated app?

same reason as any other enshittified website as of late: you lose control and at some point they will make it painful for you to use stuff you like, because your convinence is not necessarily profitable.

If you are fine paying them $15 a month or ads (and yeah, that's the sticking point here: ads in the middle of your white noise seems to defeat the purpose f white noise) or whatever for those vast variety of white noise and the loss of control, I guess it's a successful business transaction. But I say this as a fogey that still prefers to have MP3's on my phone, so I don't know what the modern users want.

> Could I switch apps if I had to...? Sure.

glad you could. I dont get that sense from many users in other big apps, sadly. That's why they can scheme like this; they know angry fogey's like me are the minority and quickly replaced.

I don't know if you've ever been in a very noisy environment, but the tinny speakers on your android/iPhone absolutely won't cut it if you need to drown out lower frequency sounds - so for me, it's extremely convenient to be able to instruct my smart speaker to open my Spotify brown noise playlist.

i just carry earbuds around. And my phone even has a headphone jack, even though I switched to BT years ago

It's stuff like this that resulted in a sort of death by a thousand paper cuts for me with streaming services. I was fed up enough to put a lot of effort into getting my music library onto a NAS and serving it through plexamp. I now have a seamlessly loopable 10 minute long white/pink noise flac file I can play from anywhere and am not beholden to platform lock-in (at least not in the same way as Spotify where my library cannot be taken to another platform, at least not easily). It takes some upfront work and a bit of a hobbyist's attitude towards it but it is extremely rewarding to not be beholden to a platform and to own your own music library.

Do you have your flac posted for download anywhere? I’m not skilled at editing and I can hear the loop restart with every attempt I’ve made thus far.

for a few bucks, you can roll your own:

https://www.analog.com/en/analog-dialogue/raqs/raq-issue-154...

https://circuitdigest.com/electronic-circuits/simple-white-n...

the analog link is great. thank you!

To generate seamlessly looping noise in Audacity:

Generate your favorite type of noise. If you want to apply filters/EQ, do it now. If so, trim several seconds from the start and end of the filtered noise to make sure there are no audible boundary effects from the filters acting on the start or end of the noise.

Duplicate the noise twice, so you have three copies of it, all on separate tracks. Drag track 3 to the right until the beginning of it snaps into alignment with the end of track 1 (watch for the yellow line; it's very important to align all the edits correctly). Drag track 2 somewhere in the middle.

Using the auto-snapping again, select both tracks 1 and 2 in the part where they overlap (drag across both, using the auto-snapping to align the selection. You should see two yellow lines). Use the "Crossfade Tracks" effect with a "Constant Power" fade type to crossfade tracks 1 and 2. Do the same for the part where tracks 2 and 3 overlap.

Select the beginning part of track 1 where it plays alone (snapping with the yellow line again) and also the empty space below it (drag down). Delete this. The tracks should all stay in alignment. Select and delete the ending part of track 3 where it plays alone too. Mix all the tracks together using Tracks, Mix, Mix and Render.

If you loop the result you get effectively 2 copies of the noise playing simultaneously but out of phase, repeating indefinitely, very slowly crossfading in and out, and with the loop point of each copy set at zero volume so you can't hear it.

This is brilliant advice. Thank you!

I've had success with these. I misspoke, they are just a minute long. https://www.demolandia.net/speaker-test/noise.html The white and pink noise loop seamlessly for me in Foobar2k, Plexamp, and Squeezebox

I recently found one on Spotify that is 10 hours long.

If you find a shorter one just put the track on repeat and up the cross-fade to like 3s.

I wonder, what is the cross-fade of two white noise signals? This ought to be doable on pencil and paper I think.

The iPhone has generated white noise since iOS 2015 [0]. How difference is the effect of the Spotify lists you use vs ios’ white/brown/green noise?

[0] https://www.rd.com/article/iphone-white-noise/

You just have to look in the bottom drawer of the locked filing cabinet marked "tax returns", in the sub-basement room with a sign on the door saying "beware of the tiger".

Sorry, somewhat off-topic, but this article is a great example why LLMs will beat old-school web search. Huge article full of stuff you already known of you got there via search and the entire valuable content is just this:

"Here’s how to play white noise on your iPhone, step-by-step:

Head to your iPhone’s Settings. Next, tap Accessibility. On the Accessibility page, find Audio/Visual and select it. From there, search for “Background Sounds” and toggle it on."

No more garbage for SEO! What is white noise? Why would you want to play white noise? Who created white noise? When did it become popular? How to play white noise on iPhone. Conclusion.

You don't need a LLM for that. Old-school web search can excerpt only the step-by-step instruction on the search results page.

Now of course, you get lawsuits from site owners because a visitor can get the information needed without actually visiting the site which is detrimental to the site owner's ad revenue. Expect this kind of lawsuits to continue as LLMs become popular.

  Head to your iPhone’s Settings.
  Next, tap Accessibility.
  On the Accessibility page, find Audio/Visual and select it.
  From there, search for “Background Sounds” and toggle it on.

Wild. Why is it under accessibility?

Some people (often autistic) need these types of noise to get through a day because they are sound sensitive. So it was originally added for them.

Much like a lot of accommodations for disabled people, it turns out to be useful for a lot of other folks too. :)

Accessibility is the last line of defense in fight for general ergonomics, because it sets legal limits on how shitty and user-abusive the UI/UX can get.

Ask any software tester: “if I can’t get to that screen element, how is a screen reader supposed to?”

In a similar vein, I always enable 3-finger drag on my Mac. This used to be in Touchpad settings, but it's now in accessibility.

It’s absolutely wild to me that this isn’t the default. I can hardly believe people can use trackpads without it and not rip their hair out.

Apple loves stuffing features and settings under accessibility. They are technically not wrong, but it's getting a little weird.

There's a 10 hour white noise video on Youtube, you can use that.

Spotify doesn't keep the screen on for ten hours.

You can actually play YouTube videos on iPhones with the screen off. Just start the video, sleep the phone, and then restart it by tapping the screen and then tapping play, or by squeezing your AirPods.

Why would someone stream ten hours of white noise when they could download a 500KB loop and play it forever?

Downloading 500KB of pseudorandom numbers is insane. Just generate them on the fly.

500kb isn't even an afterthought for modern computer storage (modern pictures are MB's huge) and doesn't require technical thinking past "download music file".

Because many of these tracks do not loop properly and make you wake up from sleep

Well sure, but then you just download the whole ten hour track and play it whenever you need. That's what I do.

It might be that Spotify pays per song rather than per minute. Songs have been getting shorter in length because longer songs mean less money for artists.

If you have 10 6 minute songs, someone can only listen to 10 songs in an hour. If you have 20 3 minute songs, someone can listen to double the number of songs in an hour. If you're creating an album of white noise and trying to make the most money from Spotify, you don't want to create a long "song".

Yeah thats the same argument for movies being shorter as well.

Thats why a lot of movies have crept down to 80-90 mins. It allows theaters to fit a whole extra showing into the day, which means more box office revenue. Only the big hits are generally allowed by the studios to be longer (like a Christopher Nolan or James Cameron movie for example).

Because the same thing is true for movies. A theater ticket is going to be $10 regardless of whether the movie is 75 mins or 180 mins. Might as well squeeze more showings out.

That and sometimes you just want a short-@55 movie: https://youtu.be/-UKbwz6s6VY

on the other hand: few movie goers are seeing multiple movies a day, and movies make their money on concessions, not ticket sales. They don't necessarily care about many movies a day, as opposed to 2-3 big hits that can get people in. if Nolan can get 100 people in for the 180 minute oppenheimer as opposed to 20 people for the Haunted mansion, the goal is clear.

> Because the same thing is true for movies. A theater ticket is going to be $10 regardless of whether the movie is 75 mins or 180 mins. Might as well squeeze more showings out.

Interesting – in Germany a small supplement for "over-length" movies was (or still is?) a commonplace thing.

Set the track to loop and turn on the crossfade setting.

You can buy perfectly loopable white noise tracks on iTunes for $0.99. Permanently yours. Don’t need internet. Looping feature built in into the music app. As a bonus I have a Shortcuts home icon that plays it in a loop and sets focus mode to sleep.

Why would anybody buy something that can be substituted with cat /dev/urandom > /dev/audio?

There are thousands of free apps that do exactly that.

Streaming white noise from Spotify or iTunes seems, to me, incredibly crazy.

I’ll answer you seriously: it’s easier to pay $.99 for an mp3 of exactly what you want than spending 30 minutes finangling free software tools.

Download white noise generator app, press play.

Get pwnd.

Or have your battery drained even faster by yet another ad-infested surveillance "utility" app.

Really? You can't spend 5 minutes to look up software that will generate many different types of noise, perhaps even tuned for the use case? And why the resentment for free software? You are gonna have an easier time finding that kind of stuff as a simple webpage or better yet on f-droid rather then on an ad infested, corpo boot licker laden platforms like google play and the app store. Just the fact you don't have to sweep trough heaps and heaps of garbage is a plus. Sure normies are gonna prefer paying for an mp3 or whatever, but we are on hacker news, we should strive for better. (and maybe help enlighten our fellow clueless users...)

It’s not better. It costs 30 minutes. $1 is a way better value.

because piping dev/urandom into my speakers wont be pleasant background noise it will have some horrible high-pitch noise i last heard when i used dial-up and i don't want to hear that again. so i would have to mess with it and waste time making script to sculpt the random sound wave to not be to low pitch or to high pitch or to quiet or loud and by the time i have something usable i have spent more time playing with bash, and looking at pulse-audio man files than I really want.

This thread reminds me of Hacker News’ famous comment about DropBox

You've overlooked that "white noise" here is a colloquial term referring not only to what you've described, but also to recorded sounds of water, wind, loud cafes, ambient drones, and more.

Is it technically accurate? No, but most people's feathers aren't ruffled by it.

And I have a shortcut that turns on the white noise apple includes on the iPhone for free. No internet, no tracking, no money, and no cluttering music app with white noise track

I have 6 long hour audio track I found online years ago that i use as white noise. its actually a loop of the Star Trek TNG ambient warp engine thrumming sound effect it not actually random but works for my needs. i just keep it on my pones computers or tablet and play it when i need white noise

I'd love a copy of this! Night-me would too!

"I can only presume there is a limit on song length for albums,"

Definitely not, I have plenty of real songs in my Spotify library that are an hour long or longer. My guess is that it has more to do with how Spotify calculates artist payouts and that white noise "creators" found that they could get 20x the number of views if they split all of their tracks up into 3 minute chunks.

Install SoX and you can generate noise without using any data at all. Even without internet access. Imagine that.

  play -n synth 60:00 whitenoise
  play -n synth 60:00 pinknoise
  play -n synth 60:00 brownnoise

Or make your own wav files:

  sox -n whitenoise.wav synth 60:00 whitenoise
  # Also works with pinknoise/brownnoise

I wouldn't use lossy compression to compress these. There's no redundant data in noise so lossy compression will just make it less noise-y. I can only imagine that noise on streaming services sounds weird.

Cool trick for when you're at the computer. Not practical for sleeping for most people I'd say.

If you make the wavs you can put them on any playback device you like.

I sometimes use the "chroma doze" and generate colored noise with my phone. Playing it over the phone speaker isn't great, but if you need some noise it will do.

A lot of these white noise thread are not just straight up pink / white / brown noise, some of them vary with time to create more soothing effects like wave sounds or sounding like a vacuum etc.

Speaking from experience of trying anything to try get babies to sleep!

You can totally do that too.

This is a nice synthetic ocean sound, with "waves":

  play -n synth brownnoise synth 0 0 0 10 10 40 trapezium amod 0.1 30

Or with a little more high end, it sounds like gusts of wind:

  play -n synth brownnoise synth pinknoise mix synth 0 0 0 10 10 40 trapezium amod 0.1 30

Definitely. It has been my goto for white|brown|pink noise for a year now. Even the animation on the terminal looks a bit like "waves". [1]

Could you please share any other examples of commands?

[1] https://ibb.co/GVG0Rdf

play seems to hang on my macos terminal. Its just stuck on:

        File Size: 10        
        Encoding: n/a           
        Channels: 1 @ 32-bit   
        Samplerate: 48000Hz      
        Replaygain: off         
        Duration: unknown

        In:0.00% 00:00:00.00 [00:00:00.00] Out:0     [      |      ]        Clip:0

That's weird. Works OK on mine.

> sounding like a vacuum

You stumped me there. Then I got it.

If I were Spotify I would include some noise generators and clever sample based waterfall noises in the subscription. People pay money for this already, it's free* market share.

In fact it's actually built into the iPad.

*Obviously it takes time to develop but it would take one smart guy a day so if your team struggles it's on you.

This is what I was thinking, and they could just bundle the sound files, or generate them on the fly, so they don't have the streaming cost.

I think the idea was born with Sleepify[1] in 2014. (I love how Wikipedia classifies its genre a silence). This was kind of a stunt back then, receiving mainstream media attention and ultimately allowing the band behind it to finance a small tour.

Of course, repeating this one-time creative feat is just boring and annoying and for Spotify it is just a slippery slope. If they forbid silence, people will upload white noise, if they forbid white noise people will just resort to some low effort AI generated sound. None of which is desirable for anyone.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleepify

I get why people might want white noise in their earbuds, but why would you want to stream it? You can easily download a multi-hour recording of, say, a waterfall, and just play it from your device.

And who in heck would listen to white noise with ads? Wouldn't the ads completely destroy the intended effect of the noise?

This is a phenomenon I really don't understand.

I can offer a couple of explanations.

1) UX is better through a streaming client. It'll be named cleanly, it'll have a nice thumbnail. Whereas a downloaded file would be named white_noise_128bit_v3.mp3 and would be in a Downloads folder with 10,000 screenshots and memes, and every time you try to open it you have to find it.

2) All-in integration with everything in one client: Here's my white noise in my history next to my favourite banger, next to my last podcast. Tonight, as I go to bed I decide I want to listen to....one of those. They're all there in one place.

3) Discoverability UX. Go to Streamer app. Search White Noise. Press Play. Done.

vs.

Go to Browser. Search White Noise. Scroll through pages of results of links about white noise, articles, listicles. Search again for White Noise Mp3 Download. Click top result. Get inundated with ads and links that LOOK like they should be a download, but actually take you to an ad network. Finally find the download link. It opens in an in- browser player instead of a download. Give up.

It's honestly to the point that most of our parents or grandparents can't even get there.

4) Oh also repeat the same but for audio players. Are there good local audio players? That aren't inundated with ads? And each with worse playback UX than Spotify/etc? Most phones now come pre-loaded with Spotify or YoutubeMusic or AppleMusic. Good luck figuring out what is a good local audio player.

You do know that white noise can be generated really easily, right?

Tap on white noise app, press play.

You don't have to worry about having downloading the track so it's available when you hop on a plane, or having internet, or using mobile data.

Plus, most white apps have an equalizer to tailor the spectrum and several noise generators. You might like brown noise more in certain situations.

i do know that. I was responding to OP as to why people stream white noise, instead of downloading it.

I have a toddler, I'm well aware of white noise apps.

I'm still explaining why it's logical for people who think of white noise as audio to seek it in their music streaming app rather than getting Yet Another Single Use App, or dealing with downloads.

On point 4) I would say that there are good local audio players. A good audio player should support most file formats. Definitely the ones that are "findable", mp3, flac, ape, ogg, etc. Bonus points if it supports full-album flac with cue describing seperate tracks. For some reason "certain" sources like to distribute like this. On windows I use foobar2000[0], on mac Cog[1], and on linux honestly most players support standard features. If you're on an os that is more functionally compromised like Android, iOS, etc., you can always use VLC[2]. Note that the flac+cue thing doesn't always work properly and on foobar you have to find and install an extension to get it to work. Foobar is really nice as it support batch processing nicely. Also about the flac+cue thing, in foobar you can easily convert to separate tracks. It also runs fairly well in wine.

[0] https://www.foobar2000.org/download

[1] https://cogx.org/download.php

[2] https://www.videolan.org/vlc/

> I get why people might want white noise in their earbuds, but why would you want to stream it?

Most likely because they already use spotify. They are familiar with the interface and is their go to spot when they want to listen to something. So when they want to listen to white noise they use what they already know.

Convenience of just going to the Spotify app and not needing to think about finding/vetting another app or source. I don’t know many people outside of HN-types who download instead of stream media anymore.

> You can easily download a multi-hour recording of, say, a waterfall, and just play it from your device.

That's the thing, you can't, not easily. On mobile—especially iOS—it's frustratingly difficult to transfer and use normal files without an associated app.

Isn't there a generic music app?

I mean can't people just sync music to their iphone like they were doing with ipods in the past?

On iOS, the "generic" music app became Apple Music. It is possible to use a local library but I suspect many/most people don't even know that, Apple really pushes you towards their subscription streaming service.

Sounds like what it was like to use an iPad to organize files, before the Files app in 2017(!)

On Android, I use a YT client app to download a 320kbps M4A of the white noise file, and then play it on anything I want...music app, podcast app, audiobook app...they all work, just like they would on a computer

The Files app is on iPhone too to be fair, but I find it very limited. Probably much more straightforward to use Spotify.

You literally (unless they've changed it?) cannot edit a file extension on an iPad

I just went and checked. By default extensions are hidden and can't be changed. If you hit the menu thing and select "Show all extensions" you can now edit file extensions.

Seems appropriate to me. Changing a files extension is pretty unusual and will break things in ways users don't understand. But if you do know what you are doing, it took me 20 seconds to work out how to do it without reading a manual.

You definitely couldn't do it when I saved my file as .vkm

Convenience, "it's there". Tons of people use youtube to listen to music even though there's dedicated music apps. Loads more people consume Reddit via computer voices reading them out on Tiktok while a random recording of a GTA race or Subway Surfers plays. Others watch Tiktok videos on Reddit.

I don't have an answer, but I'm fine with not understanding. Let people have things for their own reasons.

For reference: https://www.instagram.com/reel/CwBEqV9OBTe/

> I don't have an answer, but I'm fine with not understanding. Let people have things for their own reasons.

This way of thinking creates things such as Electron.

The thing that powers one of the most popular work chat apps and one of the most popular code editors?

The thing that reduces context switching for developers? The thing that has increased the number of apps that would have been websites during the dark times?

Tons of people use youtube to listen to music even though there's dedicated music apps.

I do that too, like a radio, but I recognise that music is far more "contentful" (for lack of a better word) than white noise variants, the latter of which can easily be generated locally on-demand for as long as you want.

> This is a phenomenon I really don't understand.

It's status signaling.

Anybody can send pseudorandom numbers to their audio device, but some people are rich enough to do it on a thousand dollar device, using a paid subscription to download megabytes of pseudorandom data over mobile data, storing it on expensive flash to achieve the same result.

Don't judge it through a rational lens. It's primitive status signaling.

I don't think that's it. If this conversation was being had a decade ago, more people would be saying "download an MP3, keep it forever".

The younger generation grew up with Spotify having everything available for a subscription. We grew up with OG Napster, which really did have everything.

I actually have used white noise sometimes, and it also used my data, and I was absolutely unaware of white noise generators, so I guess one possible answer to your question is people like me :(

I feel the same way about music. Why bother deleting it after you've downloaded it only to download it again later and do the same thing. And with ads? Yuck. It's a system only a lawyer could love.

If there’s content I want to watch, I’ll check each streaming service. I’ll even buy or rent it if I can watch it on demand. If I really want the content that’s not easily accessible then I’ll resort to torrenting. It’s convenience more than anything. Most people I know who are not tech savvy don’t even open the files app on iOS. I doubt they think about downloading a 5hr white noise file.

Streaking versus downloading is a technical detail. For a user, the only difference is that downloading cna be done in advance, when you expect crappy or expensive internet connection.

But, additionally: Spotify has a client cache, so it's not always streaming - though it may be intended for a couple of albums or play lists regularly accessed, not hours of podcast content.

Sounds less like Spotify is annoyed than record labels are annoyed. Spotify is being paid by its users regardless of what they decide to listen to.

On YouTube one of my most-watched videos in terms of watchtime for a while was brown noise overlaid on a recording of ocean waves. The video was three hours long I think and monetized. YouTube probably doesn't care if that share of my YouTube Premium subscription money goes to the guy who uploaded that video, a professionally recorded studio production or some person doing vlogs in their bedroom. Why should Spotify?

It depends on if these users are paying for premium or not. Since the streams are described as having embedded ads, users probably aren't too worried about removing Spotify's own ads, and I doubt track skips or selecting specific tracks in the album are in demand by any primarily white noise users

I doubt anyone is listening to these from a free account with ads, that would defeat the purpose.

To me the embedded ads which the article identifies as the source of revenue for these white noise streams would also seem to defeat the point for me, but apparently that doesn't bother people so I don't see why spotify's ads would be different.

My guess is that it's far more likely that major labels start their own music streaming services, mimicking the Netflix/Hulu/Disney/HBO/Peacock etc explosion in video streaming.

No idea if it would be a smart business decision by the labels, but they could definitely do it and Spotify would only be left with independent artists and labels who don't join the bandwagon.

YouTube has no risk of this. There's no entity, or coalition of entities, capable of pulling content from YouTube that would create a noticeable dip in traffic.

> My guess is that it's far more likely that major labels start their own music streaming services

They can't. Unlike movies, there's great value in back catalogs. If Die Hard isn't available on a movie streaming service you will likely not care. If Pink Floyd (or Beatles, or Aretha Franklin) isn't available on a music streaming service, a huge number of people will care.

There are ~4 big companies that control 70-80% (by different estimations) of music. But individually they own different chunks. Sony can't start a streaming service if they don't have music owned by Warner etc.

>"It can’t be that an Ed Sheeran stream is worth exactly the same as a stream of rain falling on the roof," Warner Music Group CEO, Robert Kyncl

Why not? You've already made millions in profit on Ed Sheeran's content. Once you've broke even on the cost of making the content delivering more of it costs exactly the same. Regardless if its music or sounds of rain falling on a roof.

If Ed Sheeran's music was removed from spotify tomorrow it would significantly decrease the amount people listened, and presumably some people would stop subscribing.

If any particular white noise album went away it would have no impact on revenue, people would just listen to a different one.

> it would significantly decrease the amount people listened, and presumably some people would stop subscribing.

Not sure about that.

The main value proposition of Spotify is that is a audio marketplace that consolidates legacy music catalog via big labels (EMI, Roadrunner, Universal, etc) plus the Podcast platform sindication and in a certain stance discoverability.

Everything keeping the friction in a minimum level.

Of course Ed Sheeran is a big name, but I think it’s debatable that, let’s say the top 1% of his fan base in the Spotify user base would trade the huge amount of friction due to his catalog removal.

I think way more than 1% of fans would switch to Apple Music etc.

Sorry to insist in this point, but as far as I know a big artist left the platform does not has a huge impact. For instance: Neil Young left the platform at Jan/22 and the user base had a constant growth.

Another point that I forgot to mention: not all subscribers are equal to Spotify.

A heavy user that listens Ed Sheeran is less desirable than a heavy user that listens a bunch of podcasts. On the former Spotify needs to collect and pay to the labels and for the latter the cost is marginal.

If we’re talking about one artist, eventually the platform natural growth will offset the effect of a single artist leaving. Platform and network effects is something strong.

If you’re talking about a “catalog removal”, for instance, Universal removes all artists in their portfolio I am more than happy to agree that Spotify will suffer.

[1] - https://www.statista.com/chart/amp/26773/profitability-devel...

Let me humbly suggest that people use actual files for their noise needs. The two apps that work in tandem are syncthing and vlc. Syncthing gets the file from a desktop to your phone. VLC lets you play the file on your phone. (Getting a file to your desktop is another tool, but that depends on your source. For generating noise Audacity works great! But you can also rip CDs, and so on.)

It feels very wholesome about playing a simple file, rather than streaming it. This is apart from the considerable simplicity and robustness of the solution. You can be on airplane mode and it will work. You can use VLC player features to speed up, slow down, or loop it. You can build up a play list rather than using search all the time. My phone sips power compared to streaming music. It also doesn't use your network bandwidth, which is nice.

Note: you could also build your own noise tracks on your phone with a mobile DAW. I like https://www.image-line.com/fl-studio-mobile/ - it's $15 but quite powerful.

...or just downloading fron youtube with newpipe. I guess even a browser is enough using an invidious instance.

Also kdeconnect works great as well to transfer files from computer to phone and vice-versa.

Brown noise is the way to go.

White noise is too broad - and largely unnecessary - the higher frequencies are more likely to damage your hearing over time (particularly at any elevated loudness, ie if you're trying to drown out some loud noise to sleep). Brown noise will do a far superior job at blocking out snoring, thuds, etc.

I don't know how people sleep with white noise, the highs are too screeching.

Been listening to playlists of brown noise on Spotify lately while working, when I get tired of listening to actual music but still want some background noise. More indistinct and less distracting than other ambient sounds.

The primary benefit to me of using Spotify for this is that I'm already set up to control music on my sound system from my phone.

I can understand listening to white noise. But listening to white noise with ads? People actually do that?

Some product like an AI driven aquarium screen saver.

Like the ones we had in the 90's without the AI?

I don't know if this case per se is the same, but people have tried to game spotify monetization in the favor of certain artists before. For example a band released a sleeping album with only silent tracks and asked their fans to listen to it over night, so they'd get higher stream counts. Fans did that at little cost. The album was eventually banned. This just might be similar. I wouldn't assume any humans actually hear the white noise or the ads.

If they were smart they would just lean into this and add support for easily looping shorter tracks into some kind of "atmospheric listening" product.

Surely that would bring down their bandwidth costs at the very least.

There are tons of popular paid apps that do this kind of thing already, there's an obvious market for it.

But I haven't found Spotify to be very smart recently, so they'll probably just keep complaining about it, or do something stupid like update their ToS to disallow this kind of thing.

They'll probably just acquire calm.com which does exactly that. Nobody at Spotify is concerned with profitability.

Is nobody here familiar with the notorious problem that is stream-farming? People will upload white noise to Spotify and use phone farms (no idea why VMs [potentially behind VPNs] with [prepaid] Spotify accounts wouldn't work) to scam Spotify out of thousands of dollars every month.

I think every new artist account has a limit of 3000 daily streams per track before they get flagged for botting. The solution is to upload loads of shorts tracks to every artist account, since Spotify only takes streaming numbers into account, and not playtime.

This also has hidden costs for Spotify, such as the unnecessary bandwidth and storage required for all this audio no human even listens to.

Just add a white noise generator and call it a day?

Missing the point a bit I think. (=

Spotify isn't geared to handle people streaming 8+ hours of ASMR audio per day.

Their model doesn't support having to pay artists for audio tracks people put on random shuffle while they sleep / game / study / work.

"White noise" here I think just means tracks without talking.

So mic scratching, inaudible whispers, tapping on random items, mouth sounds... all the stuff ASMR folks do.

These folks figured out how to get Spotify to pay, with a bunch of new tracks every week that people are actively listening to, and Spotify doesn't want people doing that.

> Their model doesn't support having to pay artists for audio tracks people put on random shuffle while they sleep / game / study / work.

?! putting spotify on in the background of something else has to be more than 50% of their use. That's partly why the payouts are so low.

Does Spotify pay more if users stream the track in the foreground? Or what do you mean?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_Walk_(TV_series)

Are you saying you believe the issue is 1. that people listen to spotify 6/7/8+ hours a day, or 2. that people listen to those tracks specifically ?

If it's 2 then it makes no sense Spotify needs to pay either way, and if it's 1 then it makes no sense either, people didn't start listening to music in the background while working or studying or relaxing or cooking once white-noise-like feed appeared, they've been doing that since before I was born, so if spotify business model doesn't account for that model it is simply not viable.

From the article, it seems the issue is another thing entirely : people listen to that while sleeping, and that drives the value of advertisements down.

> Their model doesn't support having to pay artists for audio tracks people put on random shuffle while they sleep / game / study / work.

That is literally Spotify's main use case

The payment model of “streams per play” has always felt wrong to me. Wouldn’t a more rational be “how does this user’s monthly fee get divided”?

Let’s say someone pays $10/month for Spotify. First Spotify takes their cut, let’s call that $3 but whatever it is. There’s $7 left. If someone ONLY listens to Taylor Swift that month then she deserves the full $7. If someone listens to 50 artists for 20 hours then those 50 artists can divide the $7.

You can set the pool size and divide the pool a few ways. I’ve got ideas for how I think that should be done. But in any case I’ve always thought the division should be on a per-user basis rather than entire ecosystem.

100% this. As a consumer that tries to do active choices the current model breaks any kind of active choices to support or not support an artist, except nudging it somewhere in the margins. If your pot is only going to work you interact with, you can suddenly make an impact for smaller artists.

The counterargument I see is that subscribers who listen to lots of different artists will have a smaller share of the pot for each artist than someone who listen to just one artist. But I see the inequality here is not as bad as the other option where almost all my subscriber fee now goes to a few mainstream artists I probably never listened to. I also bet a lot of smaller artists would benefit more with a per-user pot, instead of always getting a minuscule share from the global pot.

The most important thing you'll read today: Your iPhone has a white/brown noise feature under Settings > Accessibility > Audio/Visual > Toggle "background sounds".

On computers, use https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/whiteNoiseGenerator.php and press "b" for brown noise.

Aren't there audio ads injected of the free version of Spotify?

How can one sleep when those come up?

Or do they only inject ads between songs, so that if the song is long enough, the user will never hear any ads?

Like with TV, I suspect people just blank them out, or they become part of the experience.

Or it's paid subscribers.

Spotify has a few awesome playlists with different noise colors. Those "songs" are probably licensed by Spotify and not paid per play.

I made white noise that plants trees (20k so far)

www.mptr.ee

https://www.thissongplantstrees.com/streaming#background

Spotify needs to license https://mynoise.net and include their dozens of soundscapes into the Spotify client.

The captured audio soundscapes are high quality, engineered, mixable audio from many relaxing and peaceful natural and artificial environments.

Tossing a few million dollars towards the MyNoise people for something that's currently donor-ware would be amazing for the creators as well as opening up the ambient soundscapes to millions of people.

Spotify gets royalty-free audio that takes up very little bandwidth.

They're talking about bird noises, the article said, among other things.

That's called ambient noise.

That's not white noise.

I wonder why they did not just add the feature if it is so desired? Feels like the code required and UI changes would be minimal.

Since iOS 15 iPhones can generate “background noise” including dark noise, balanced noise, rain, ocean, etc. You can even play it at the same time as music, a podcast, etc. with its own, independent volume control.

An icon appears for me when in the Control Center when I swipe down, the “Hearing tile”, and can be used to play/pause and change Background Sounds.

Can also be accessed this way:

1. Open Settings and scroll down to Accessibility

2. Tap on that, then scroll to the Hearing section

3. Choose Audio/Visual

4. Tap on Background Sounds

5. Turn on Background Sounds by tapping the on/off toggle

https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/07/23/how-to-use-rain-d...

Maybe like Netflix film grain, Spotify could generate the white noise locally and reduce bandwidth usage?

Did you read the article?

> Netflix film grain

TIL: https://www.slashcam.com/news/single/Netflix-removes-movie-n...

I despise this with every fiber in my body. Intentionally adding noise back to a picture?! What in heavens name for?

Is there at least a way to turn it off?

It's an intentional artistic choice, if you denoise people don't like it, because film noise is nostalgic and vinyl has a warmer sound, etc etc

If you download the video file and play it back locally, you can change it or turn it off if you want, it's just a video filter

You can even turn off deblocking if you want, get those crispy jpeg-like artifacts!

It's all just post-processing, when it was previously hardcoded, which seems like a win, especially considering bandwidth gains

Is it so different from adding lens flares?

Depends if the flare is excessive or not: my eyes see flares, adding lens flare can simulate that. My eyes don't see film grain.

Lens flare, as the name suggests, is a product of lenses, and the number, shape, and colour of flares is determined by the lenses in the film camera. Humans with normal vision rarely see lens flare, but it can be caused by astigmatism, LASIK, or other conditions.

It also requires staring into a bright light, so don't do that.

> It also requires staring into a bright light, so don't do that.

I have astigmatism. Most modern headlights produce lens flares when driving at night. Street and traffic lights also. Doesn’t need to be harmfully bright to flare, just brighter than the background.

I'm pissed that they remove it from the first place. I want to watch a movie the way the filmmakers originally intended, not with Netflixs modifications.

The thing is you can't. What the silver iodide did 100 years ago is now coupled to complex chemical processes that affect the picture quality and sometimes serious choices in restoration (see Metropolis).

Film grain is horribly incompressible and 100% different randomly from frame to frame. It tends to be the first thing that vanishes from MPEG-compressed video.

(and of course if your film is shot on digital, then it was never there)

Did the filmmakers really intend for their films to have grain in them, or was it a feature forced upon them by the nature of their tools?

If non-grainy film stock had been available for the same price, do you think filmmakers would have intentionally picked the grainy film instead? Every single time?

To me it's less about what they wanted to achieve, and instead about what they actually achieved with what they had available.

As an over-the-top example: Most people (that I know) would agree with George Lucas re-edits of Star Wars with newer CGI are worse than the original edits. The only reason to choose the newer edits are because they're released in HD and the original is not.

In practice, you are happy with all sorts of artefacts introduced by compression, and that's all this really is – a method of encoding data about what you are looking at in a smaller space.

It's actually part of AV1 https://norkin.org/research/film_grain/index.html

The noise is added back in after decompression. The article explains it.

I watch anime with a CRT filter on via MPV... it makes trash computer drawn anime have actual texture to it, it just feels better.

Noise can reduce the visibility of artifacts, generate apparent detail that is missing in actuality as well as being a signifier of particular styles or time periods.

You'll be telling me that distortion pedals and valve amps are a bad idea next.

Film grain synthesis in AV1, what's being discussed here, is about preserving the appearance of grain from the input but still reaping the compression benefits of denoising. This isn't a "make movie more film-y" layer they're just slapping over a pristine source.

Now the filmmakers may have done that in the first place, depending on how the movie was made. So for say, things made by Netflix themselves I'm sure they sometimes use fake digital film grain, but that's coming in at an earlier step in the process.

I think this representation is a bit misleading.

They considered intervening with them, which by far doesn't mean banning them.

To put it into context after their acquisition they had been pushing podcasts in general, white noise podcast accidentally profited from it, and a bit too much.

Which is with what they considered intervening with.

But banning them would have been the last step if others don't work.

And even then you still would have white noise songs, just not podcasts. Or more likely podcast just not promoted, i.e. you need to more explicitly look for them.

I.e. the chance for Spotify removing users access to white noise content was close to non-existing as far I can tell.

What’s your source on all of this?

It's basically all present in the article

Well yes, they could forbid publishing noise on the platform, and just offer their own white noise content for users to access.

Sounds like there is a niche for an ad-supported white-noise podcasting platform?

Also picked up by engadget:

https://www.engadget.com/spotify-almost-removed-white-noise-...

iOS, iPadOS, and macOS all have a built in noise feature that you can enable through accessibility settings, and quickly toggle on and off and configure through Control Center. I use it every day and there are times where is a lifesaver, especially combined with noise canceling headphones.

https://www.theverge.com/23131327/how-to-iphone-white-noise-...

If music is just auditory wallpaper anyway, why distinguish?

For anyone who likes white noise, highly recommend the Dom white noise machine.

https://a.co/d/gbr7cV9

It's what most biz folks use (eg therapists, massage, etc) in their office to ensure privacy.

We've used one for like 9 years with my son and it helps him sleep really well too.

On mac or linux with sox installed, this is a perfect source for brown noise: play -n synth brownnoise gain -25

Also works for whitenoise or pinknoise.

The logical move would be for Spotify to product their own, that way they don't need to pay anyone. I mean c'mon it's 2023, how hard could it be to create autogenerated white noise, Apple already does it.

Anyone has noticed also that the "instrumental" keyword becoming mainstream and even totally false? More than half "instrumental" playlists and songs are including vocal singing...

Solution: add whitenoise generation as a base function to the app. Direct related searches to the in-app function

Bonus: this will also offload your servers significantly, specially as pure noise is hard to compress.

Saves me explaining to my partner that there is no such thing as 'Scandinavian white noise', just like there in no such thing as 'Scandinavian pure white light' </s>

Another good free white noise generator website: https://noises.online/

We specifically use an app called White Noise for this type of thing. It has all the noise colors (I prefer pink noise), doesn't stream, and plays without ads.

Are there any long-term effects on hearing or health caused by listening to white noise while sleeping? Or from the hum of an air conditioner, humidifier, or dehumidifier?

I wonder if I have to pay Spotify to join their podcast publishing thing. Personally I'd go with pink noise, but not if it cost money.

> White noise podcasts

> these podcasters, whose shows entail playing various noises like crashing waves or bird sounds on repeat

These are not white noise.

I listen to so much of this stuff. It's super annoying. I just want 10hr mixes.

I want an app that just does this and nothing else that is not terrible.

If you’re on iOS, it’s baked into the OS. Setting > Background Sounds.

I wish it had a few more (eg rain without bird noises). Being able to add my own would be great.

    cat /dev/urandom | aplay

Noisily works in a browser or they have apps https://www.noisli.com/

An app I use, at least on Android, is "Atmosphere: Relaxing Noises." Outside of a couple banner ads I don't get interrupted or anything and it has a lot of mixing options. I highly recommend it. IDK if they have an IOS version or not

Well, people asleep listening to ads, should technically be great due to the continuous subconscious delivery of the ads.

https://archive.ph/MaXIb

Spotify to me has been crap since they tried to ruin podcasts by making a walled garden

I'm not familiar with this. What did they do that made them a walled garden?

Some spotify podcasts can only be played on the spotify app.

They bought out podcast producers and stopped publishing their podcasts outside of Spotify itself.

Thanks. I didn’t know that and I’m surprised that producers would agree to put all of their eggs in one basket like that. The success of their business is now directly linked to the future success of the platform.

They started to pay podcasters to publish on Spotify exclusively. E.g. Joe Rogan.

Why don’t they just build a white noise generator into the app themselves?

You can just generate white noise locally, why bother with a recording?

It's way simpler.

It is amusing to me watching the effects of capitalism take hold over something as simple as literal noise. I used to use a website for this purpose but then they started getting super weird with popups and "please donate" click-thrus.

I decided to write my own noise generator. It's not hard. If you have access to OpenAI (or a semester's worth of DSP education), you could write one in a few hours.

> capitalism take hold over something as simple as literal noise

Scapegoating "capitalism" doesn't strike me as sufficiently nuanced thinking.

For instance, Tidal, has playlists dedicated to things like rain sounds e.g. https://tidal.com/browse/playlist/5ed2512d-b27b-4d0c-845d-3f...

Capitalism has literally nothing to do with it. This is just people reacting to market incentives. Capitalism requires (free) markets but markets aren't Capitalism.

Also the environmental aspects. Powering and provisioning hardware in CDNs to encode and stream random numbers... pretty dumb.

Hosting a website costs money, has nothing to do with capitalism.

The curious outgrowths of consumerism never fail to surprise me.

let alone it's not compressible

Just make a generator that plays on the device.

just use mynoise.net

it’s amazing.

...it sucks that people listen to white noise when they could be listening to the newest hits instead? Yeah, sure, but they wont? If you get rid of the white noise, they go back to youtube or whatever. If you push people to other content, they wont click or theyll skip it if what they want is white noise.

Youve got a massive platform, incredibly successful, loved and used by so many, and you go "ah darn, i really hate that my users on my platform choose to spend their time on content that isnt as profitable as other content on my plaftorm"???

Jesus christ thats daft. Serve the users what they want and they will stay with you forever.

Further, this seems like such a freaking simple fix. Provide first party white noise.

Crazy to think that iOs does and it barely gets noticed.

TIL

It's tremendously hidden. Of course it barely gets noticed.

There are so many hidden gems in accessibility settings, at this point it should be called advanced settings instead.

No it isn't, on ios 16.6 it's not even 10 clicks to get to the granular options. Are you on an older version?

I feel as though accessibility is not a spot most people would think to check for that.

10 clicks is tremendously hidden.

I tested right now and it's 5: Settings -> Accessibility -> Audio/Visual -> Background Sounds -> on/off/sounds/etc.

It may be the number of items that are part of why people consider these settings "hidden". The "Accessiblity" menu is now 23 items long, and the main Settings menu is 53 Apple items plus over 100 application items.

Well yes, when there are thousands of possible configurations to accomodate the vast majority of potential users, and to keep confusion to a minimum by assigning a unique place in the UI to every possible option, it has to be spread out a lot.

Even the most buried possible setting in iOS is 9 clicks or less, and for the bigger features usually a lot less as you've demonstrated, hence it's not correct to call it 'hidden'.

That's assuming the correct path is taken every time. If I didn't know where the white noise tool was, I wouldn't even think to check the settings for a noise generator. But if I did, it would go

Settings then Sounds & Haptics. 16 options, none seem to match. Maybe "personalized spatial audio?" Oh no,that's saying I need special headphones.

OK it's not under Sounds. Maybe it's in the Focus section? That's what I would use white noise for, focus. 6 options. Maybe it's under "Work Focus" or "Sleep Focus"? No.

General? 15 options, all with sub-menus but none seem relevant.

Control Center? Probably not... That seems safe to ignore. Except if I selected the "Hearing" option in Control Center settings, that actually gives me access to the background noise generator in control-center. But that doesn't seem obvious to me at all.

OK next is Display & Brightness and Home Screen. Probably safe to skip. Which then brings us to Accessibility. Again, it doesn't feel likely to me that it's in here, but no other choice in the settings feels correct, except maybe the Music app? Nope nothing there.

I check accessibility. I look past 18 options and see "Hearing" again, might as well tap that option. Even "Background Sounds" doesn't match what I'm looking for mentally, "White Noise". So it's likely my eyes miss it when I scan the list of options.

IMO it's an app. So make it an app, not an accessibility setting.

It's still hidden, just in a breadth of options instead of depth. A needle hidden in a 1 acre lot covered 1cm high in hay is more hidden than a needle in a 10 ft cube haystack.

There's a search tool, for all the menus, right at the top?

Have you ever used an iPhone as a day to day device?

A user manually checking every possible submenu to find what they are looking for would be quite an outlier. If they are that determined then I don't see what the issue is, since presumably they are then going to inspect them all anyways.

Random numbers with a brand would the ultimate excess of Capitalism.

There was this band who was making money by asking their fans to listen to their white noise playlist 24/7

iirc it was a blank track so literally no sound and it was supposed to be for founding a tour

Vulfpeck's Sleepify album. The tracks were silent so you could play them in the background. They used the proceeds to fund a free tour for their fans.

That cuts to how much of a mess spotify payouts are in general, where the subscription revenue pool is paid out based on global listens, and the people with fewer hours of use don't control which artists get most of their money. But as far as I'm aware the big labels don't like the idea of changing that.

it seems likely that's the "plan that never came to fruition" mentioned in the article.

They do.

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1DWUZ5bk6qqDSy?si=...

As well as for other colors, such as brown noise.

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1DX4hpot8sYudB?si=...

You can afford that when you have a monopoly.

Is Spotify a monopoly? They're competing with all the tech giants: Apple Music, Amazon Music, YouTube, not to mention good old fashioned piracy.

Yandex Music, too, which is surprisingly good

Spotify does not have a monopoly.

Spotify has been doing everything in its power to make sure it never becomes a monopoly; it regularly infuriates and sends users running for YouTube, Amazon Music, Apple Music, Google Music, Tidal, Sirius (dare I say; their successfully competing competitors)

Can confirm, I have favourite rain noise playlists on both applications. If one goes, cya.

FTA it’s a little more nuanced than that. People are listening to white noise podcasts when regular white noise is available at a cheaper licensing cost.

It feels like a UI challenge as much as anything else, I can’t imagine many users specifically want a podcast. Part of me feels like Spotify deserves it though, they’ve been trying to shove podcasts into users ears for ages now and I don’t want them. Turns out if you shove podcasts in front of people they’ll choose them. Price they pay.

> People are listening to white noise podcasts when regular white noise is available at a cheaper licensing cost.

There is something incredibly surreal about this statement.

Heh, true. Presumably it’s also available at absolutely no cost… just not in top podcast searches?

OK, here's the story:

Spotify pays content creators based on how many ads are played.

A white/brown/pink/etc. noise track/podcast is likely to be hours long, so that listeners can have it play long enough to fall asleep. Once asleep, the listener is still technically "listening" to the track/podcast, including the ads that Spotify then must pay the content creator for. With tens or hundreds of millions of listeners each listening to hours of content, this cost adds up.

Spotify has its own white/brown/pink/etc. noise tracks that it doesn't need to pay anyone for. Those are what Spotify would like to see its users stream, because it could save them - by their own calculation - $38 million.

Beyond that, the giant media corporations whining about the fact that money is going somewhere other than their own accounts is... par for the course. Really, this entire situation speaks to the absurdity of the industry itself and its own greed.

Funny how every industry is criticized for being too greedy when the set up of incentives really doesn't leave any other option. It's existence vs being greedy and people (and firms) do what's obvious. If we want a music industry that isn't greedy it needs to be listener and musician owned.

The entire system is greed demanded by law. It's well past time for copyright to fail as a business model, but instead we have it propped up on legal scaffolding (read: threats).

>Spotify’s challenge with white noise podcasts mirrors a similar conversation happening in the music world. Universal Music Group’s CEO Lucian Grainge and Warner Music’s CEO Robert Kyncl have both voiced their displeasure at the fact that songs filled with noise are paid out of the same royalty pool shared by their superstars.

It just means that people value white noise over the music your artists are creating.

not necessary, i'm not giving the same attention to rain sounds that to any other music, this type of content is design to be consume as background sound so most of the reproductions are less valuable if you equate attention = money, it was like the moment when youtube quality = time view and you have millions of multi hours low quality gameplays in the main feed, i feel this is the problem of only account time view over 30 as metric of monetization.

The technical problem is that noise compresses poorly. What is needed is a way to generate the noise as needed.

Now people don't want just any noise, they want artisanal boutique noise. so all you need is a bpf style language artists can plug into your noise generator, then people can pick the superior custom noise algorithm.

hashtag: only_half_joking

There are a few white noise generator apps actually and I love them. https://asoftmurmur.com/

Oddly enough, there already are free and paid products that do exactly this- you can even add birds, insect noise and ambient sounds. Choose light rain, heavy rain, anything else in between. You can even choose the surface the rain is hitting- concrete, tin roof, etc.

Do you have a name? I am interested (insect and bird toggle, surface select)

On iOS, Rain Rain is my favorite. It’s a free with limitations app, but I don’t find the limitations too bad.

But honestly, we have a HomePod mini that does 99.999% of the work in the house. The HomePod has half-a-dozen or so background noises including rain, ocean and white noises

if you use iPhone, you can turn on "background sounds" under accessibility settings - no app required

The mandible chatter market is underserved.

all they need to do is to add an "autoloop" option to a track. people won't notice that it loops every minute or so

People will definitely notice the loop point if they're trying to sleep.

My Android app (Chroma Doze, est. 2010) uses this algorithm to splice noise segments together:

    When adding two streams together, the perceived amplitude stays constant
    if x^2 + y^2 == 1 for amplitudes x, y.
    
    A useful identity is: sin(x)^2 + cos(x)^2 == 1.
    
    Thus, we can perform a constant-amplitude crossfade using:
      result = fade_out * cos(x) + fade_in * sin(x)
      for x in [0, pi/2]
    
    But we also need to prevent clipping.  The maximum of sin(x) + cos(x)
    occurs at the midpoint, with a result of sqrt(2), or ~1.414.
    
    Thus, for a 16-bit output stream in the range +/-32767, we need to keep the
    individual streams below 32767 / sqrt(2), or ~23170.

Noise does compress poorly, but can you tell the difference between eight hours of a fan blowing, and two seconds of a fan blowing looped for eight hours?

Given how well the brain recognizes patterns, I would venture to guess, "yes". Even 20min. looped would probably become familiar.

I wonder how much of the technical problem Spotify actually cares about. From the sound of the article, they really only cared about the cost of paying out ad revenue.

Then again, if Spotify really cared about saving bandwidth costs, they would have never gone to CDN from P2P.

>"It can’t be that an Ed Sheeran stream is worth exactly the same as a stream of rain falling on the roof," Warner Music Group CEO, Robert Kyncl told Music Business Worldwide earlier this year.

Why not?

My thoughts exactly. How out of touch are these people?

Heck, this is the market doing its thing, isn't it? You can't say you want capitalism and then complain because the market demonstrates as much demand for the sound of rain falling on a roof as for a particular singer-songwriter. I think WMG is just annoyed the person who uploaded the rain noise doesn't have to pay royalties to the rain and keeps the entire cut.

I'm sure WMG also thinks WMG's contribution to Ed Sheeran's music on the platform is worth the millions they get paid as middlemen. At least the rain is contributing something by making a noise.

I guess their issue might be that if people listen to white noise 8 hours while asleep every night and Spotify distributes their monthly fee weighted by time listened, then a lot of their fee will go to the white noise for sleep and thus the total fee distributed to their daytime music would be unexpectedly significantly reduced.

The easy fix would be to cap track time weight, although that is susceptible to an attack of splitting the white noise in many parts and publishing a playlist.

I guess a possibility could be to somehow compute "song variety" (i.e. entropy in a model where the decoder can generate noise/randomness) and weight by that, but not sure if the available lossy codecs are good enough to do that.

I hate to say it but certain advertisers might pay more for ads that play while people are sleeping (ie placement during 8 hour tracks of white noise).

This is not a $38m-in-costs crisis for Spotify, this is a revenue opportunity!

...

60 seconds of web seaching later... Sigh. Apparently this sort of marketer manipulation started over three years ago unfortunately: https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/a36719140/sleep-... and https://www.science.org/content/article/are-advertisers-comi...

... things that make you say: "There oughta be a law..."

I think this is why google really wants to control the brower. Once AI is cheap and on every device, the user has the ability to use it to filter all inbound. Trivial for a local LLM to strip hate speech from a twitter html regardless how much Elon wants you to force you to see it.

Most people don't even use an adblocker, despite how easy it is. I think you will have a hard time trying to get a substantial number of people to install a filter for opinions you/they don't like.

You may want to actually look at the adblock usage. It’s massive unless artificially disabled. Enough for Facebook and Youtube to fight it with escalating countermeasures

I agree with your interpretation, but I'd like to also offer another way to view this phenomenon that Spotify's higher execs also missed: Spotify is lucky and has found a way to monetize a feature that is readily and freely available elsewhere, and they should just be happy to get a bit of profit for it.

I would take the opposite approach and figure out how to maximize the return on the white noise without changing anything for the users; that is, focus on reducing the cost to deliver white noise, work on guidelines for the white noise presenters on how you're going to monetize this without disrupting the fad, etc.

From my perspective, I just can't see how trying to do something special with this fad does anything but immediately kill the fad. There are even FOSS white noise apps, and it won't take long for users to find a free alternative if Spotify messes with the recipe here. I sincerely doubt anyone is going to get Spotify exclusively for the white noise nor that white noise will somehow be a gateway into further Spotify use; I just don't see that the persons who want white noise would use that as an entry point into the service, it's the other way around, with current satisfied users finding out they can also use Spotify to get white noise.

Basically I see this as a happy accident for Spotify that will break if they try to press on it too much. They should treat this like a beneficial fad, and just figure out how to deliver it with the least resource cost, and just enjoy the extra revenue. I don't think it's really going to draw people in except if they play the "yeah, this is legit, we're just gonna get out of your way as much as possible here. enjoy our ads", and ride that money until it dries up.

The entropy in white noise is maximal, if it's really white noise.

One sample of white noise is indistinguishable from another; so if Spotify can identify white noise, then they can dedup, i.e. serve the same sample for every request for white-noise track.

What I find annoying is that people are wasting bandwidth uploading and downloading an undifferentiated hiss. White noise is trivial to generate locally, without consuming any bandwidth.

[Edit] Real white noise has the same energy at every frequency; the total energy in white noise is effectively infinite. Practical "white noise" is low-pass-filtered, which means it's no longer real white noise.

I wonder if these samples are really pink noise, and Spotify is talking nonsense?

A finite-length sample of the most perfect white noise will not attain maximum entropy. You mention a lowpass filter -- that's accomplished through the sampling frequency. But your proposal is an effective lowpass filter, as any frequency longer than the sample length will clipped to exactly the sample length -- which you'll be able to hear as a distinct rhythm if it's a sub-audible frequency, or a tone if it's shorter.

Taken to the extreme, you're looping a single datum: https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/random_number.png

Well, Spotify serves lossy compressed audio anyway. I don't know much about audio compression, but presumably it's first bandpass-filtered, and then filtered to remove psycho-acoutically unwanted audio components, and then compressed as a bitstream.

Imagine being CEO and just not getting it

I know which one I would rather listen to.

Right, the white noise is timeless; eventually it could be worth more.

I suspect it's from people with long covid with sudden onset of tinnitus trying to find some relief during the sleep. I had to do that for a few months if I wanted to have any sleep at all before my neurological symptoms subsided. It looks like Warner has no idea about it.

Because the value of playing recorded music of an artist some folks enjoy enjoy is microscopic compared to the value of helping people to sleep better. Probably also true for individual listeners, but definitely for society as a whole.

Probably not the CEO's point though.

But I like the way you think much better...

Well, realistically though - and I know your comment was rather sarcastic, but still - some people pay tons of money to go to a live concert, but nobody ever paid for a white noise concert.

So I think it is reasonable to say that pop music is worth more. Let alone the fact that it takes tons more work to create.

Worth is entirely subjective unless there is intrinsic value in these things. For example - if no one listened to or interacted with either, would we still say there's value in their existence? There is probably very little. Otherwise, the value comes from whatever relationship the appraiser has to the music or sound.

Some people value sleep, others value sounds of nature, others value pop music, and others value money. The take on anything or anyone's value or worth usually tells us more about the appraiser than the subject.

Probably.

Yes, it is subjective for each person, but we can look at aggregate spending and based on that see that there is a lot of financial value in pop music, with a large industry around it. There’s no such equivalent for white noise.

I fully acknowledge that, to the best of my knowledge, no one has tried to sleep better by congregating with thousands of similarly-sleep-seeking others into a jam-packed stadium.

I will also point out that, again to the best of my knowledge, extremely little money is made by the music industry on sleeping pills, sleeping hardware (beds, mattresses, pillows) and necessities (covers, duvets), nor on specialised sleeping gear (masks, blinders, apneu machines).

Also: most people try to or need to sleep every night, but can go without a concert for multiple days. If you can sell something on a recurring basis, you don't need to make a ton of profit on each sale to get a nice income stream.

Finally: I think it is harder to improve the sleep of someone struggling with that, than to create entertaining music.

Well when you value low effort content and high effort content equally, you discourage people from making high effort content when they can make money by just recording their roof.

I don't think people will stop making music or podcasts because a tiny sliver of low effort content makes money. There is a cap on how many people can make money by uploading white noise since it's so generic. Plus for a lot of people the money isn't even the primary motivator behind their high effort/quality content.

I doubt musicians are putting their songs on Spotify for that juicy .0007 per play. Only a few make any real money on Spotify.

Lol, so the only people making serious money most of the time are Distrokid and Spotify.

Well Spotify also has never made a profit.

They suffer from the “DropBox problem”. Streaming music is a feature not a product. Apple, Google and Amazon don’t need to sustain their business based on streaming music. It’s a gesture to make their hardware more attractive.

That Spotify has some issues distinguishing how to pay their providers between the two and has turned into a much more lucrative place to put your white noise than anywhere else is specifically a Spotify quirk, not the consumer market telling a music CEO that music is worth less than noise.

The honestly pretty obvious answer to "why can't Ed Sheerhan's song be worth exactly the same as rain" is that the market demonstrates that there are lots of other places to get free rain noises or white noise or what have you while far fewer non-ad-or-subscription-supported on-demand song playment options.

Ed Sheeran is also just as free

I’d imagine he’d think differently if he owned the rights to it.

People aren't paying Spotify for white noise. They're just using it for white noise because it's convenient and they already have it.

This is frankly very very obvious.

> "...an Ed Sheeran stream is worth exactly the same as a stream of rain falling on the roof... -- Warner CEO"

you know, I've been making this argument to point out monopoly pricing for a long time: how come when I go to a theater, all the movie tickets are the same price? films cost a different amount to make, and some of them are good while others are stinkers. In any other business with a range of products like that, sellers compete on price. Movies are price-fixing-ed.

They charge less for earlier shows. So the thing they’re selling isn’t the movie, but the seat. And they do get more expensive if the theaters are selling out.

I wonder how this works between the theater and the studio. I think some movies are different prices to show, but maybe studios have some control over ticket price as well?

Edit: this article has some discussion https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/01/why-do-...

Poorly attended movies lose screens more quickly and move to cheaper venues (second-chance theaters, video/streaming) faster. Theaters want to get consistent usage of their screens if possible -- offering cheaper seats for cheaper movies would be counterproductive.

because it's about ad money and maybe paying to promote a podcast (idk. if that is a thing)

white noise content is the best example of "user most likely doesn't active listen" so an ad on it isn't worth much

for other podcasts you would assume people listen (through yes they might not, but Spotify has no practical way of knowing that), so ads are worth more

Additionally the ad industry values that their ad is associated with "premium content" (whatever that means) and while white noise is "highly valuable for the consumer needing it" it's not "premium content" as it doesn't has much content. I mean it's literally noise, well fine tuned noise you could call art, but still noise. So highly valuable but not premium.

One man's artisanal white noise is another man's encrypted offsite backup.

how do you think he listens to them, is there any app that can play non audio (wav, mp3) files?

    cat file.bin | aplay

Back in the day, we'd just

  cat /dev/random > /dev/dsp

which was especially fun when 'who' said that there was only one TTY session active in the computer lab at night, and you were logged in from your dorm. Or so I'm told.

That can be true of any file. One person's gif/pdf/html/whatever is another person's stegano-encrypted data...

> ... it concluded that shifting users away from white noise programming could net the company an additional $38 million in profit

I don't think that's how ... well, _anything_ works. It's like saying "If got rid of the actual program on our TV channel and filled the whole spot with adverts, we could make three times as much money from adverts".

They're not there to buy your product, they're there because there's a free thing they want. When that free thing goes away, so do they.

We do brown noise all night every night. White noise is too harsh imo.

Surely this user hostile behavior will have no repercussions. Enshitification must continue.

After all, removing features your customers are using too much is a recipe for profit.

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