Relax With Natural Sounds By Using Ambient Noise Music Player In Ubuntu

Natural sound has been recommended worldwide for better concentration, improving focus and relaxation. I often listen to various meditation music available on YouTube for the sole purpose of relaxing myself. Listening to sound of birds, insects, rain, river etc can be very soothing at times.

Android and iOS has a number of apps dealing in ambient sound/natural sound/white noise music. Thanks to Ambient Noise player, we have a dedicated application that brings relaxing sounds to Ubuntu. Moreover, it doesn’t require internet connection. You can play all the sounds offline once you install it.

Install Ambient Noise in Ubuntu

Ambient Noise player can be installed using its official PPA for Ubuntu and other Ubuntu based Linux distributions such as Linux Mint, elementary OS etc. The application is around 165 MB in size. Use the following commands to install Ambient Noise player:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:costales/anoise
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install anoise

This works flawlessly in Unity. To use Ambient Noise in GNOME, you might need to install this extension.

By default there are eight natural sounds in Ambient Noise: Coffee Shop, Fire, Forest, Night, Rain, Sea, Storm and Wind. You can get some additional sounds by installing the community extension.

sudo apt-get install anoise-community-extension1

Remove Ambient Noise

To uninstall Ambient Noise, use the following commands:

sudo apt-get remove anoise
sudo add-apt-repository --remove ppa:costales/anoise

Using Ambient Noise

Ambient Noise is not your regular music player. There is no GUI for it, not even an applet indicator like Radio Tray. When you run the player, it will be added to the sound menu in Ubuntu. You can control it from here. To change between the sounds, click the navigation arrows in the sound menu.

I do think that there should have been some configuration options available. For example, it would have been great if music could be shuffled between the available choices automatically.

What do you think of Ambient Noise? Have you tried it already? Do share your experience with it.