Ambient Noise, or ANoise is a simple, lightweight application for playing ambient noises, such as waves, rain, fire, and so on, useful to help you stay focused and boost productivity, or fall asleep.
The application didn’t work in Ubuntu 16.04 and newer until recently, when it was updated to GStreamer 1.0 and Python 3, along with some bug fixes.
ANoise runs directly in the Ubuntu Sound Menu, without a GUI. From there you can easily play various relaxing sounds such as rain, wind, forest, storm, fire, night, coffee shop, or sea.
Besides the Ubuntu Sound Menu, ANoise also supports the Media Player Indicator extension for GNOME Shell, as well as the Linux Mint (Cinnamon) Sound applet. Although for Linux Mint, note that the ambient noise icon is larger than it should be.
Here’s ANoise running in GNOME Shell (with Media Player Indicator extension):
ANoise can also be used on desktop environments without Ubuntu Sound Menu / Media Player Indicator. In such cases, you can install the ANoise GUI:
Other ANoise features include:
- default sounds: rain, wind, storm, fire, forest, night, coffee shop and sea;
- it remembers your last played ambient noise between reboots;
- includes a sleep timer as well as an option to start automatically on system startup;
- unlike some websites that offer the same functionality, ANoise works without an Internet connection;
- supports custom sounds. You can copy extra ambient noises (ogg, mp3 or wav) into the ~/ANoise or ~/.ANoise folder and the application should be able to use them (you can also add a .png with the same name as the audio file to be used in the Ubuntu Sound Menu);
- extra ambient noise packs are available in its PPA.
Note: if the ANoise GUI package is not installed, to open the ANoise preferences you’ll need to click on the ANoise entry in the Ubuntu Sound Menu.
Install ANoise in Ubuntu or Linux Mint
To add the Ambient Noise PPA and install the application in Ubuntu or Linux Mint, use the following commands:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:costales/anoise
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install anoise gir1.2-webkit-3.0 Note that the default ANoise sounds package is about 100 MiB in size!
Once installed, simply launch “Ambient Noise” from Dash / the menu, and control it from the Ubuntu Sound Menu / Media Player Indicator Extension / Cinnamon Sound applet.
For other desktop environments, you can install the ANoise GUI using the following command:
sudo apt install anoise-guiFor extra sounds, you install the ANoise community extensions, by using the following command:
sudo apt install anoise-community-extension1 anoise-community-extension2 anoise-community-extension3 anoise-community-extension4Here’s what they contain:
- anoise-community-extension1: river sound;
- anoise-community-extension2: old air conditioner, large boat, house fan, fountain, forest rain, fishing boat, dump truck idling and diesel motor sounds;
- anoise-community-extension3: white, pink, brown OSSL and brown noises;
- anoise-community-extension4: pinery wind, old dam waterfall, thunderstorm, stoney creek, rideau river, lake superior, lake huron, frogs, dinosaur drain and coon creek sounds.
For more about Ambient Noise, see its web page.
Originally published at WebUpd8: Daily Ubuntu / Linux news and application reviews.
