Experience the lossless audio soundscapes of Found Audio at foundaudio.club. Streaming at 1411kb/s—10x better than Soundcloud’s 128kb/s.
Inception
The poor streaming quality of Soundcloud wasn’t cutting it for me and couldn’t find an alternative long-format audio streaming site that would stream at lossless bitrates.
Like many great projects, Found Audio was born out of solving a personal issue. I wanted to stream my long-format, multi-gigabyte recorded audio files at the same bitrate they were recorded at. However, I could not find a platform that offered such a service.
Existing Solutions
The leading platforms, Mixcloud and Soundcloud, both stream at an abysmal 128kb/s. That was inadequate for audio recorded at 1411kb/s.
The streaming bitrate was analyzed using ffprobe for the exact same audio file between Mixcloud and Found Audio’s backend object store, S3.
Mixcloud’s 128kb/s bitrate
Found Audio’s 1411kb/s bitrate
Website
With the proof of concept in place, I was pleased to have a way to stream my recorded audio files at lossless bitrates. However, as I shared the streaming links with friends, they expressed interest in accessing the same streaming improvements for their own audio files. It became clear that a web interface was the next logical step.
Not being a front-end web developer, I chose Svelte for the framework due to its simplicity and ease of use.
Final Touches
Adding CloudFront in front of S3, the object store, was as trivial as typing this sentence but made a tangible difference in the media’s loading speed.
2025 Updates
This project was originally created in 2023 and is now being updated for 2025. Please enjoy this preview! It was made nearly exclusively with the latest AI developer tools I mentioned in various end of 2024 blog posts.