Ambiance: Using Your iPhone to Escape from it All

Hello readers! Since this is my first post, I should probably introduce myself. I’m Erik MacKinnon – your newest contributor here on iPhone Nuts. I’ve edited and written numerous blogs over the past few years and I jumped at the opportunity to join the fantastic team here. Hopefully you’ll find my posts informative and entertaining! (I’ll aim for the latter.)

Ambiance – touted by developer Coneybeare Labs as an “environment enhancer” – is an intriguing new application that has recently hit the iPhone App Store and has burned its way up the rankings to become one of the top paid applications in a matter of three days.

Ambiance does one simple thing very well – it plays looping noises or sound effects that are meant to help you block out external noise and concentrate on whatever it is you’re doing. The interface is rock solid, quick, easy to use and it functions as intended with no sluggishness or crashing issues. (Which is more than any of us can say for some of the applications released so far!)

Included with the launch version of Ambiance are a variety of sound effects: “Birds”, “Blue Noise”, “Clock”, “Creek”,”Crickets”, “Fan”, “Machine”, “Pink Noise”, “Rain”, “Violet Noise”, “Waterfall”, “Waves”, “White Noise”, and “Wind”.

Birds, Clock, Creek, Crickets, Fan, Machine, Rain, Waterfall, Waves and Wind are pretty self-explanatory – they’re looping sounds that sound just like you’re sitting there listening to them. Used to hearing a grandfather clock tick the time away? You’re all set. Spent a few years in a tent and just can’t sleep without the sounds of crickets as a lullaby? No problem. Finished your tour of duty with the Dharma Initiative and miss the sounds of the island surf? “Waves” has you covered. Blue, Pink, Violet and White Noise are different versions of what most people call “static” – that hissing sound you hear when you wake up at 4am and the TV is snowing.

Ambiance also includes a timer function (see screenshots below) which you can use to turn off the sound effects after a set length of time. I put it to the test by turning on “Birds” before I went to sleep and sure enough, there were no bird noises when I woke up. Talk about easy!

Pros:

• It just works: all it takes is a quick glance at the App Store reviews – for anyone that is into hearing these kinds of sounds to tune out the rest of the world, Ambience works like a charm.
• The timer: the timer function is quite useful for those that need some sort of ambient noise to help them sleep.
• The price: at 99 cents, the price is right.

Cons:

• As soon as you leave Ambiance, the sounds cut out too. There is no way to have the sounds playing in the background as of yet. This means that you can’t use your iPhone or any of its features while you’re using Ambience. (Note: This issue exists for all Apps and likely won’t go away until Apple enables it in a future firmware)
• Some of the included sounds are very loud (Blue, Pink and White Noise especially – watch your volume settings!) while others are too quiet to cover noise from outside the included Apple headphones (Wind, Machine, Crickets).
• A huge addition would have been to use the iPhone’s microphone to continuously listen to surrounding noise, and then inject a signal flipped 180 degrees out of phase into the sounds coming from Ambience. This would have essentially given Ambience the functionality of a pair of noise-cancelling headphones alongside its bevy of soothing sounds.

Ambiance is available now from the iPhone App Store for a whopping 99 cents – which includes future updates bringing a much needed volume bar for iPod Touch users and at least ten more ambient sounds including favorites like “Rain – Tinroof”, “River” (not to be confused with “Stream”, which will also be in the next update or “Creek” which already exists), and “Subway”. Yes – if you’re the type that can’t concentrate without the clanging sounds of the E Train blaring you can relax… it’s only an update away!

Screenshots:

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