I wrote my app's intro music as a Python script and almost nobody will hear it
My app opens with a fourteen second welcome film. I wanted a calm ambient score under it and did not want to license a stock track for one screen, so the music is a 50 line numpy script. Warm pad chords built from layered sine waves. Small chime accents placed on the same timestamps as the scene captions. A low hum that slowly breathes underneath. It renders the exact same wav every run and it added about 300KB to the mp4.
Then the browser rules arrive. Autoplay is only allowed muted, so the film starts silent and the score sits behind a Sound on button. The realistic case is that most people watch the whole intro and never find out the audio exists.
I still think it was worth it. The unmuted version feels finished in a way the silent one does not. But I have no number for how many people ever tap unmute. Has anyone measured unmute rates on a product intro video, and were they high enough to justify the audio work?
Replies
Sine wave pads from a 50 line script beats a licensed track nobody notices either. The unmute button is basically an opt-in you designed against yourself, autoplay muted rules did that to everyone. I'd still keep it, the silent version being worse is the actual signal, not the unmute number.
@irahimiam Arash's framing fixed something for me. I built this assuming the audio was the missing piece, but the caption beats already carry the pacing on their own, sound underneath is confirmation, not information. If I ever ship another intro like this, I would design the silent path first and treat the score as a bonus for whoever finds the button, not size the effort against how many people press it.