Westminster chime sounds: why the free ones loop
You can find a free Westminster chime mp3 in about a minute, and it will do exactly one thing: play the same few seconds back, on repeat. A recording is a single performance, frozen. The tenth stroke is the first stroke, and the loop seam — the small gasp where the file starts over — is the part your ear catches first.
What the chime actually is
The Westminster Quarters are four notes, played on four bells, in five short arrangements that tell you which quarter of the hour you're in. Written for a church clock in Cambridge in 1793, borrowed by Big Ben, and now the sound inside doorbells the world over. The full story of the tune is on its own page.
A real tower doesn't loop, because a real tower doesn't play back. Every strike is an event: hammer meets metal, the note swells, and the sound takes its time leaving — softer, softer, and gone. The room changes it. The hour changes it. That unevenness is a large part of why a bell sounds like a bell instead of an alarm.
Why the seam shows
Loop a recording and two things give it away. First the cut: the file has to end somewhere, and a bell's decay doesn't end neatly — the editor fades it, and the fade is a sound too. Then the repetition itself. Your ear is good at patterns; after the third identical stroke it stops hearing a bell and starts hearing an audio file. That's not a failure of the recording. It's what recordings are.
The alternative we chose
Horologe doesn't contain a single recording. Its five bells are computed at the moment they sound, with the strike varied a little each time, so no two strikes are exactly alike. It's about three and a half megabytes, and it sounds like bronze. It strikes the hour whether or not you asked, it keeps quiet from ten at night to eight in the morning, and it costs $5.99 once.
If you want to know how that works — the partials, the decay, the reason there's no mp3 anywhere in the app — we wrote that out too. And if a looped file is genuinely all you need tonight, use it; free is a fair price for a sound you're only borrowing. We'd just rather the hour got told than played back.
Read next: How to hear Big Ben on your Mac