Is there a question so stupid, it’s genius?
Last month, redditor squidbrain asked, to his regret and everyone else’s amusement, “Can you get .gifs with sound?”
That post quickly made it to the site’s homepage, drawing thousands of (mostly mocking) comments. GIF stands for Graphics Interchange Format, one of the oldest types of graphics file used online.
And an animated GIF with sound is just a video, for which there are plenty of formats. Right? Right?
Well, not exactly. Sure, you could create a video. But people have grown attached to the charming simplicity of animated GIFs, with their crude resolution and repetitive looping.
A few days before, in an entirely different thread, some redditors had played around with matching animated GIFs with audio from YouTube videos.
Those combinations turned out to be pretty damned funny. So one redditor streamlined the process.
The result: Gifsound.com, a repository of repetitive animated GIFs matched with YouTube audio tracks. Wondering what one looks like? Try “Dogs Diner.”
It took redditor metabeing just four hours to make the site—“It’s quite simple after all,” he wrote in an email to the Daily Dot. After the site launched, metabeing matched it to a section on Reddit, r/gifsound.
He said he plans to keep Gifsound as simple as possible. But metabeing, who is a website developer by “day and night,” has some plans for improvement. These include a mixer board, with a set of GIFs and music that users can pick and choose from, as well as top ten lists and voting.
We asked him if the site was part of some greater world domination plan—or just for fun.
“Both,” he replied. “My world domination plan is to make lots of quick, simple, and fun websites until one becomes a megahit.”
Gifsound may not be a megahit just yet. But it is a colossally fun timewaster. And the best possible answer to squidbrain’s question.
