Show HN: I built a simple ambient sound app with no ads or subscriptions
ambisounds.app41 points by alpaca121 7 hours ago
41 points by alpaca121 7 hours ago
I’ve always liked having background noise while working or falling asleep, but I got frustrated that most “white noise” or ambient sound apps are either paywalled, stuffed with ads, or try to upsell subscriptions for basic features.
So I made Ambi, a small iOS app with a clean interface and a set of freely available ambient sounds — rain, waves, wind, birds, that sort of thing. You can mix them, adjust volume levels, and just let it play all night or while you work. Everything works offline and there are no hidden catches.
It’s something I built for myself first, but I figured others might find it useful too. Feedback, bugs, and suggestions are all welcome.
https://apps.apple.com/app/ambi-white-noise-sleep-sounds/id6...
Thanks for this - de-installed an alternative and installed this. Any thoughts of some sort of equalizer feature? I like brown noise for sleeping in noisy environments, and would love to be able to add a bit more bass to your sample. (Brown noise plus some Airplane is actually pretty good.) --- Side thought - there needs to be a club (with a curated list?) for simple apps that work well, and commit to staying ad-free. I'd love to be able to search amongst such apps prior to auditioning options from the App Store. (I mean, it would be great to be able to filter for such apps in the App Store itself, but that's not going to happen.) Downloaded this. It drowned out perfectly the noise from my upstairs neighbour sitting on her balcony watching YouTube videos above my open bedroom window. Thank you! This is fantastic, thank you. Recently when trying to sleep away from home, I went looking for a noise app and was grossed out by the state of the available apps, just like you said. BTW One unfortunate feature that many noise apps/websites have (including Apple Music's official noise buttons) is that after a few minutes, they fade out and back in or have some other jarring transition when repeating. This is far from ideal for sleep, meditation, etc. So this is an enhancement request, if your app doesn't already solve this ;) I'm also curious: do you think that the cost of maintaining the app (keeping it up to date with newer iOS versions, for instance) will eventually dissuade you from keeping it available in its pristine state? I've wondered why there seem to be ZERO free apps by hobbyists on the App Store in categories like this... This is great. I’ve been looking for something like this for a long time after giving up on Portal. Thank you Lovely! Couple questions… - where did you get the noises, are they your own recordings? - how hard it is to support earlier iOS? For folks like me who are on older phones that cannot be upgraded anymore (iOS 16 personally) Just downloaded! Thanks for your efforts on it. I was thinking of building something similar to the point of even learning music production, for the similar reasons you have listed. I think I can postpone my idea now. I don’t think many people would mind watching once a day ad just to support your work. But, whatever makes you happy. Thanks for trying:) and its definitely a great way to develop a good ear for sounds and pickup basic audio engineering. i certainly got comfortable with audacity along the way Wow this looks incredible! I quite like the Overcast model where you can optionally pay a little just to support the author rather than for extra features or nagware. I love the idea, and thanks for doing this. I would like to create free apps too just for the heck of it but one of the biggest issues I find with creating free app store apps is that, regardless of whether you are charging money or not, you need to keep feeding Apple $100 per year, which is excruciating, especially for countries where the developer population is much higher and the income disparity is high. Since the Play Store only charges 25$ ish and one time, it is much more feasible to do it on the Play Store, hence the availability of such apps is more on Play Store. The $100 is per year. It is still disgusting. There is no need for that fee to be there, because remember, it sits on top of the purchase of at least $1,500 (a decent Mac). I tried to see if I could make improvements to Immich. No can do, as half of their entitlements require a team account (and even then begging Apple to get the entitlements). Now, they do offer a private account, so I spent time removing those entitlements. Guess what? Starting over 3 times and you're hit with a 'you can only sign 10 apps / week'. Why do apps built for my iPhone, which I explicitly need to put in Developer mode, need to be signed by daddy Cook? Apple can charge you that because they have a platform which is a monopoly. Granted, they did the work that built and maintain the platform, but at some point it's actually the countless developers who contribute value, not Apple. True. I completely forgot about that part. I absolutely love my windows PC, but I had to buy a mac so I can support cross platform
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