
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 (including the sounds) in size.
Use the following commands to install Ambient Noise player:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:costales/anoise
sudo apt update
sudo apt install anoise
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 install anoise-community-extension1
Install Ambient Noise GUI in Ubuntu
Even though you can use the terminal to start it up, you won’t have any controls to change the sound. So, to be able to use Ambient Noise, you can install the GUI through the terminal by typing the command below:
sudo apt install anoise-gui
Once installed, you should be able to find it when you search for “Ambient Noise“. You can then launch the GUI, which should look like this:

With the help of GUI, you should be able to change the sound and tweak it to your preference.
Remove Ambient Noise
To uninstall Ambient Noise, use the following commands:
sudo apt remove anoise
sudo apt remove anoise-gui
sudo add-apt-repository --remove ppa:costales/anoise
It is worth noting that Ambient Noise is still actively maintained. You can explore more about it in their GitHub page.
What do you think of Ambient Noise? Have you tried it already? Do share your experience with it.
me in ubuntu 16.04 after installing, anoise not even show up in sound indicator. just rhythmbox and vlc
IT DOesnt support in 16.04
Under Linux Mint 17.1 KDE the anoise-gui does nothing…at least nothing visible…anoise starts playing the ocean sound and the only way to stop it is to kill it’s PID….no method to switch to a different sound. If you are not going to provide a GUI then you should at least provide some command line options and a man page.
I like it, Hope they Add more Sounds though ..City sounds,the sound of the wind rushing past your head while driving or biking.. but ya more sounds would be awesome.
If you are having your sounds, you can place them in the folder ~/.ANoise or ~/ANoise and those sounds will be available in the app.
I like the player. It should have changing of track based on day/night conditions.
it could certainly do with some additional configuration options.