Hello HN,

This is my first Show HN and hopefully a fun one for y'all.

Parrot is a web app for easily recording throwaway audio clips. It was originally intended for pronunciation practice but may find other uses.

I got the idea to work on Parrot after reading the Launch HN of Issen [1]. Thinking about ways to help language learners improve their pronunciation, I remembered an easy method I've humbled myself with in the past: listening to a recording of my own voice.

The idea is to repeatedly record and listen to yourself, adjusting your pronunciation until you get it right. What makes Parrot different from other audio recording apps is that it doesn't save a log of all these throwaway audio clips that you then have to clean up. A recording only exists until it is overwritten by a new one (all "offline" and strictly local to your own device, of course).

That seems like a scant premise to justify making a whole new app, but that small change really makes a big difference for this use case. Though I'm not sure I would have made it if that was the only reason; more of a practical excuse.

The main reason was for stupid fun. Once I imagined this music gear-like device I knew I wanted to actually make it, in all its skeuomorphic glory (only missing is the wooden table).

I don't want to spoil all the fun bits, so play around and see for yourself :)

On dark mode being too dark and "unusable": that's an intentional joke. Do try it if you haven't!

Tech-wise it's rather basic: a bit of HTML, lots of CSS, some plain JS. The difficulty was in getting all the details dialed in. My biggest takeaway:

Surprise surprise, testing and QA are so important! The number of embarrassing bugs and flaws I would have missed had I not tested across all browsers and platforms is surprisingly high. The most basic things you assume to be true might very well not be! (`audio.currentTime = 0.0;` sets audio's play head to the beginning, right? Not in Firefox it doesn't!) I 110% recommend manual testing at various points in development: some things you have to experience for yourself.

My hosted version of Parrot is not Free, but there's a GPL'd version with personal touches removed available to download [2]. Inside the tarball is also a standalone version, fully contained in a single HTML file (for use without localhost).

I'll conclude on a personal insight. Listening to recorded audio of your voice can help improve your speech (or singing!), yes. It also gets you used to the sound of your own voice, which I've found helps build confidence.

Happy to discuss :)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44387828

[2] https://www.zkhrv.com/parrot/free-parrot.tar.xz

Show HN: Parrot – a fun, skeuomorphic audio recorder to hear yourself