Ambiance by Matt Coneybeare ($0.99,
App Store) is an app which lets you to tune out of your surrounding environment and listen to a number relaxing field recordings.
On the surface, Ambiance allows you to select any of 45 different recordings and hit play, and that's that. The range of recordings is impressive, with high quality recordings of City streets, Waves, Crickets, with some of the recordings having many options to them - for instance, you can choose to listen to the sound of rain from within a car, a porch, under a tin roof, with thunder, or with wind to go with it. The depth of the selection even starts to become a little bizarre, with light saber noises, sonar, and my personal favourite for following people at night: 'Heartbeat - Fast'.
The recordings are all in high quality stereo, and sound good even with the standard earbuds Apple provides with the iPhone. However, all these high-quality stereo recordings would indicate Ambiance takes up a lot of space, and it does, at 144 MB. However the app allows you to delete unwanted recordings to free up precious space on your iPhone.
A set of preferences allows you to perform more complex functions with Ambiance, such as setting a timer for the recording to stop, with a variety of options to make the recordings fade in/out, play an alarm or quit Ambiance altogether. This makes the app ideal for people taking their mid-day powernap, or even for people who can stand having headphones in their ears when they go to sleep.
Ambiance is versatile, looks good, and delivers on its library of sounds - and it is constantly being updated with new recordings and functionality by the developer. At its low price point, Ambiance is a must for anybody considering some time to recede back into the happy place in their mind.
Topics: iPhone apps, iPhone
