2 Apps to Play Ambient Noise in Ubuntu 24.04 & 22.04

Want to play some soothing sounds in your Linux Desktop? Here are 2 applications can do the job in current Ubuntu 22.04 and Ubuntu 24.04.

To improve focus and increase your productivity, or easy to fall asleep, there are a few applications can help by playing natural sounds in Linux.

1. Relaxator

For GNOME, the default desktop for Ubuntu and Fedora Workstation, Relaxator is a free and open-source app that can do the job!

As the screenshot above shows you, it provides a stupid simple user interface that so far support only 9 natural sounds:

the sounds of the forest
the sound of the surf
night sounds.
raining sound
fire sound
sound of flowing water
ambient noise of city.
running train sound.
cat purring sound.

Just click an icon on the app window to play the corresponding sound, and click again to stop it. You can play an individual sound or click multiple icons for mixed sounds.

The app is sadly so far not friendly to dark mode, as the icon is kinda un-visible. And, there’s no volume control for each sound, unless going to “Sound” settings dialog.

The Volume Control is not friendly so far

Install Relaxator

Relaxator is available to install as Flatpak package for most Linux. Fedora 38/39 and Linux Mint 21 can search for and install it from either GNOME Software or Software Manager.

For Ubuntu, and other Linux, just follow the steps below one by one to install the app as Flatpak package:

First, press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open terminal, then run command to enable Flatpak support:
```
sudo apt install flatpak
```
For other Linux, follow the official setup guide to enable the package format support.
Then, install the app as Flatpak package by running the command below in terminal:
```
flatpak install https://dl.flathub.org/repo/appstream/com.github.alexkdeveloper.relaxator.flatpakref
```

Once installed, search for and launch the player either from start menu or GNOME overview screen depends on your desktop environment.

Uninstall Relaxator

To uninstall the app, open terminal and run command:

flatpak uninstall --delete-data com.github.alexkdeveloper.relaxator

Also run flatpak uninstall --unused to remove useless run-time libraries.

2. Blanket

Blanket is another app for listening to different sounds in Linux desktop.

Compare to Relaxator, it contains a bit more natural sounds. They include:

Rain.
Storm.
Wind.
Waves.
Stream.
Birds sound.
Summer Night.
Train.
Boat.
City.
Coffee Shop
Fireplace.
Pink Noise.
White Noise.

User can click on each sound icon, or use the individual volume slider to start or stop playing that sound. The enabled icon color varies depend on system accent color.

It supports adding custom sounds (even songs) in OGG, FLAV, MP3, WAV file formats. And, it supports sound preset! Meaning you can save your favorite sounds and volumes, and restore via a mouse click.

Other features of Blanket include:

Global start/stop button.
Middle scroll on slider to change volume.
Auto start in background.
Option to keep playing on app close.

How to Install Blanket

Blanket has an official PPA so far supports for Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 23.10, and Ubuntu 24.04.

Simply press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open up a terminal window, then run the commands below one by one to add PPA, refresh package cache, and install Blanket:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:apandada1/blanket

sudo apt update

sudo apt install blanket

For choice, Blanket is also available to install in most Linux via the Flatpak package. And, it’s available to install through other Distro specific repositories, see Github page for details.

Uninstall Blanket

For Ubuntu, Linux Mint users installed Blanket from PPA, simply open terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) and run command to uninstall:

sudo apt remove --autoremove blanket

Also run command to remove the Ubuntu PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository --remove ppa:apandada1/blanket

Finally, run sudo apt update to refresh system package cache.

Summary:

In this tutorial, I’ve show you 2 applications to play ambient sounds in Linux. They are Blanket and Relaxator. For KDE Plasma, there’s also a free open-source indicator applet to do the job.