News, Tutorials, Howtos for Ubuntu Linux
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.
Want to play some nature sounds or ambient noise on Linux? Blanket is a really good choice with a stylish user interface.
As far as know, there are 2 good open-source applications in Linux for playing ambient sounds. They are ‘Blanket‘ who has a good design on its UI, and ‘Anoise‘ which has many more cool sounds but looks ugly.
For Ubuntu 22.04, Fedora 36 or Arch Linux user with GNOME 42, Blanket looks more native because of the dark mode support and GTK4 + libadwaita port.
As you see in the picture, it can play some nature sounds including Rain, Storm, Wind, Waves, Stream, Birdsong, Summer Night, as well as a few travels, coffee shop, and other noises.
The app starts playing either by clicking on a sound icon or moving the volume control slider. It supports multiple sounds playback. All playing sound icons are highlighted. By clicking on the icons can mute/un-mute them, though there’s a global start/stop button in the top-left.
Though it has only more than a dozen of sounds, there’s “Add Custom Sounds” button in the bottom to add your own sounds. And, it supports presets and can run in background and control via the Clock menu button.
The app is available to install as Flatpak for most Linux. Just follow the official setup guide.
For Ubuntu, press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open terminal and run command to install the daemon:
sudo apt install flatpak
Then install Blanket as Flatpak via command:
flatpak install https://dl.flathub.org/repo/appstream/com.rafaelmardojai.Blanket.flatpakref
For those prefer the classic .deb package, there’s an official Ubuntu PPA. Though the package there may not be the latest due to dependency issue.
To add the PPA, press Ctrl+Alt+T and run command in terminal:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:apandada1/blanket
To install the Blanket via deb package, run command:
sudo apt install blanket
For the Flatpak package, remove it via command:
flatpak uninstall --delete-data com.rafaelmardojai.Blanket
To remove the package from PPA, use command:
sudo apt remove --autoremove blanket
And remove the Ubuntu PPA by running command in terminal:
sudo add-apt-repository --remove ppa:apandada1/blanket
ANoise Player is a handy application allows to play some background noises in Ubuntu by simply choosing a noise (e.g., rain, night, wind, sea, storm, fire, forest, and coffee shop) from system tray sound menu. More noises can be added to menu manually.
The player is an open-source project created by Marcos Alvarez Costales, an Ubuntu Member and the developer of Folder Color extension.
If you want to try it in your Ubuntu, run below commands one by one in terminal to get it from PPA:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:costales/anoise sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install anoise anoise-community-extension1
So far, Ubuntu 12.04, Ubuntu 14.04, Ubuntu 14.10, and Ubuntu 15.04 are supported. Note: For GNOME Shell you’ll need this extension.
If you don’t want to add the PPA, grab the .deb packages of anoise and anoise-media from PPA packages page. And I will recommend to install them via below command because they depend on each other.
cd ~/Downloads; sudo dpkg -i anoise*.deb; sudo apt-get -f install
Once installed, start the player for the first time from the Unity Dash and then you can always play a ambient noise the sound indicator.
To add your own .OGG noises to sound indicator, copy and paste the files into Computer > usr > share > anoise > sounds folder. You may run gksudo nautilus command to open file browser with root and do the copy and paste things.
