Folks seem to use SoundCloud for that. But its mostly music.

My 12-yr-old had a similar idea of "snap chat audio" which he and a buddy published as an app [0]. Seems a bit different than what you're looking for, which is more like Soundcloud?

[0] http://snapradioapp.com

Your 12-year old son made that? Looks great!

Audio-ur is already out there. http://audiour.com/

I first read that as ardour[1], which seemed like a terrible way to pass audio around (big project files in email?). I wonder if that confusion is what motivated them to change their name.

[1]

Alternatively, if you don't feel like waiting you could use Audiour, the original "Imgur of Audio."

http://www.reddit.com/r/Music/comments/1hr1tm/the_imgur_of_a...

It was just relaunched as Clyp: http://clyp.it

For all media files I use https://mediacru.sh/

simple, awesome , fast and opensource

I uploaded a binary, and it tried to play it: https://mediacru.sh/RfFfk7QAJqLY

The reason why this doesn't exist, and can't exist at the scale of imgur is because of piracy.

again not music but audio files. sure there isn't a sure shot way of stopping people from sharing music, but there are some things that can be done. for example, max time limit can be set to 60 sec for each audio file.

In what way would it be different from SoundCloud? No fancy commenting? Anonymous uploads?

The big thing about imgur is the community. Consider the front page of imgur. I think that's the cool thing about the idea.

You usually go to Soundcloud because you're linked there, it's not something that easily builds its own culture.

Soundcloud has a nice culture. I go there both to discover music and to listen to music I've liked. It's different than imgur but I think that partly is just due to the fact that it takes anywhere from 3 minutes to an hour to experience each 'piece' compared to an image which you can digest in a few seconds and flip through a bunch when you need to burn a minute or two.

You bring up an interesting point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7614790

debatable. soundcloud has community as well, you just might not have gotten into it yet if you simply get linked or listen to stuff from the embedded player.

Yes. And a single use - upload and share. And SoundCloud is mostly for music, this is for random audio files only.

Also, I'd like to make the service free, ad free, and maybe add a very cheap pro option.

It's flash.

kthxbye

Soundcloud as mentioned earlier is great.

Dropbox share link

The issue with this is the increasing number of people on mobile devices and variety of device types.

Worst case (and sadly most common one): You share the dropbox link, the recipient clicks on it, it opens the browser, triggers a download, he has to choose a download location, download vanishes or takes a few seconds that are spent doing something else, worst case: the person forgets about the file / best case: he digs ups a file manager, navigates to the downloaded file and opens it, player selection...maybe...and all that for a 5-15s just audio-greeting message :/

It should just work out of the box.

People seem to use Messengers for that. Like Whatsapp, which play back recorded or attached Audio. But yet this is only mobile.

could soundcloud help with this?

Maybe? I mean I could use their API and provide a simpler interface. Maybe not? I'd like this to be a standalone service though.

ytmnd.com

And the blast-from-the-past award goes to you!

Sean sends his regards :)