Archive Disclaimer
This post is an archive of this page, just in case it ever goes down. It contains no ideas by me, I just really appreciate it and would be sad if it got lost forever. As of writing, the page is all fucked up and it made me worried.
Inspired (obliquely) by this Metafilter post, I set out to answer a burning question.
LOG chime
This occurs from second **Edit: 0:59** of this video:
The chime when extracted without further processing, sounds like this:
Eudora Chime
I found a copy of Eudora Mail 1.44 for Windows (bundled up in an archive quaintly called “internet.zip”) here. The EUDOR144.EXE file is itself a Zip archive, and contains several files. The important one is WEUDORA.EXE (722,944 bytes; SHA256 checksum a35f2ef1e95242228381d9340fff0995f4935223f88a38b9200717107252dfb9) [Editor’s Note: I had to convert the file to MP3 for web purposes so this checksum and size is incorrect]
This is a Windows 16 “New Executable” (NE) file, and I used panzi/mediaextract to scan and extract the RIFF/WAV data:
They sure sound similar. But are they the same?
Comparison
I made sure that both samples were set to the same rate, and I applied simple amplification in Audacity so that they both had a peak volume of -3 dB. Aligning the tracks as best I could, I got this:
The Eudora sample is very slightly slower than the Log one. It might have been that the Eudora authors sampled the chimes from an analogue video tape. The match is remarkable, however, as they play together with only very slight phasing effects:
Conclusion
Yes, the Eudora Mail “New Mail” chime did come from Ren & Stimpy after all.
Editor’s Note: The reason I uploaded this was because my dad used Eudora till the day he died (2022). I heard this sound ALL THE TIME growing up, and it is one of my core childhood memories. Wild that I never noticed when I was watching Ren and Stimpy, as Log was one of my favorite episodes. God, that show was unhinged…