noise’r’us serves a one-second fart in MP3, FLAC and RealAudio 1.0

A one-second fart has arrived in RealAudio 1.0. Somewhere, a very old media player finally has something new to complain about.

noise’r’us supplies placeholder sounds for projects that need an actual audio file before anyone has produced the real audio. Its homepage compares the service to placeholder-image sites, the same idea of grabbing something recognizable while the real material is still being prepared. Greg Technology’s version adds a particularly mature selection of recordings, including a fart, a mic check, and an emphatic-sounding “no.”

The about page explains the practical irritation behind it: finding a clip with the length and encoding you need can take an absurd amount of hunting. The service puts those choices into the address. The pattern is the site name followed by the sound, the seconds, and an extension. Its example ends in /fart/1.mp3. The resulting pipeline has a gas problem, although this one arrives in the requested container with a very specific running time.

Thirteen formats are documented. There are the usual MP3, WAV, AAC-in-M4A, Ogg Vorbis and FLAC choices, plus Opus, AIFF, WebM and Apple’s CAF. Sun/NeXT AU and Windows Media Audio join the list. HLS gets a playlist with one MPEG-TS segment. RealAudio 1.0 sits at the end, specified at 14.4 kbps and 8 kHz, for when your test case really wants to dial the clock back.

That variety makes the same recording useful for comparing playback paths. A player that handles an MP3 hasn’t thereby demonstrated anything about a RealAudio file. Keeping the sound and requested length recognizable can help you notice whether a change came from the file format, the player, or a test setup that quietly used different material.

The metadata is more serious than the sound selection. A manifest describes the URL template, available formats, available lengths and display names. It also records hashes for the source WAV masters and identifies the destination for unknown addresses. That lets a developer discover the available inventory without poking random extensions until something makes a noise.

Each sound and duration has its own JSON record, too. The maker documents fields for the recording date, master sample rate, channel count, bit depth and SHA-256. Per-format information includes the URL, MIME type, byte count, codec and measured duration, with encoding facts taken from ffprobe. The measurements give a developer something concrete to compare when two versions of the same silly sound behave differently in a player.

The encoding details deserve the individual-file treatment. The page describes mono masters at 48 kHz, while the RealAudio entry explicitly specifies 8 kHz output. Reading the per-format sample rate avoids assuming every downloaded version has the master’s properties. That’s exactly the kind of tiny mismatch that can turn a simple playback check into an afternoon (a cherished tradition).

Predictable test media could make player debugging less tedious, provided the chosen format reaches the code path you actually need to exercise. The service even documents a sound for an unknown URL. A missing file can therefore make itself heard; what remains to check is how your particular application reacts to that response.

The 404 has its own recording.