News: Instaudio is shutting down
(Updated August 13th, 2019)

About Instaudio

What's All This Then?

Instaudio is a place where you can share your audio quickly.

The aim is to let audio creators quickly share their work with others, so they can quickly get feedback. The core of this is being able to come to the site, upload your file, and grab the link, without any further ado.

If you want to learn more about what you can and can not upload here, check out the terms of use.

Supported Files

Instaud.io supports OGG, WAV, and MP3 uploads with a maximum file size of 15MB. It does not alter the contents of the file in any way. However, the files uploaded do get scanned to make sure they match the supported formats.

Whether the files properly play in your browser depends on the browser's support for that audio type. Generally, all these formats are pretty well-supported.

History

Instaudio began as a tiny personal side project using Dropbox. I would save an audio file to a specific folder, which would synchronise via Dropbox running on my web server. I had it set up to let me access the file at a simple URL, which would show a webpage with a primitive version of the player you see on Instaudio today.

I used this utilitiy to share my works in progress with friends. Later, I shared the Dropbox folder with a friend, so he could use it too. He told me I should probably just make a website out of it so everyone could use it–minus the Dropbox part, of course.

Initial Launch

11th of May, 2013: Instaudio's initial launch day. At this point, all you could do was upload a file and get a public (short) URL to share. The audio page contained the player, and a download button.

Features trickle in

25th of May, 2013: Instaudio gets private uploads.

8th of September, 2013: Two new features: Adding/editing a description for your upload, and site-wide search. The search function excludes audio uploaded using "private upload".

26th of December, 2013: Instaudio gets a bit of a design cleanup, as well as big usability improvements when used on a phone.

16th of March, 2014: You can now sign up for an account on Instaudio. You can still upload without an account as you always could, of course. Accounts allow you to manage all your uploads, so you can delete or edit stuff later on.

20th of August, 2014: Instaudio's been growing so much it needs extra storage; uploads now get hosted on Amazon S3 when they're over a month old.

23rd of December, 2014: Instaudio becomes a little less boring: new uploads get a spectrogram as the backdrop for the player. This spectrogram does not show up immediately after uploading, because it takes a little while to generate. The process of sharing your audio needs to remain quick, so we don't wait for the spectrogram to be ready to let you through!

29th of December, 2014: Instaudio gets a simple blog, to announce updates and important stuff.

15th of April: A loop feature was added to the player. In "Edit", you can enable it by default for individual uploads.

Community

Over time, while I haven't spent a penny on advertising or marketing Instaudio, a lot of you have found Instaud.io and told your friends. Thanks for your continued support!

If you're into social media, you can Like Instaudio on Facebook or Follow Instaudio on Twitter.

Who's Behind This?

Just a guy. Instaudio is not a company, but merely a side project built and maintained by one person.

Hi there, I'm Mich! A mini-biography? Sure.

I've been tinkering with programming since my early teens, and in my later teens I got into music production. I've undertaken many personal and professional projects, and eventually landed a job at a music-related company. My job combines my love for music with my passion for programming, so I'm really happy with it.

Because I never stop programming, I managed to cook up Instaudio in my spare time.

Aside from programming, I like to try my hand at electronics projects; my current big project is to build a polyphonic synthesizer. We'll see how that goes.

Technical Mumbo-jumbo

Instaudio is built using Ruby on Rails for the backend, with a little bit of bash shell scripting in there as well. The server runs Ubuntu Linux. Database is good ol' MySQL.

File storage is done on the server itself, and once two weeks have passed, files get moved to Amazon S3. The only reason I let them stick around for two weeks is because it's cheaper for bandwidth.

The backend also makes use of avconv, sox, and imagemagick to generate spectrograms.

On the front-end of things, Instaudio uses a little bit of jQuery, and uses SoundManager2 to help out with the player. The icon font used is generated with Fontello. Any additional images I've probably made in Inkscape.