Atmosphere
I usually listen to music to provide some background noise (helpful with kids in the house), but sometimes music is still a bit too much of a distraction. White noise helps there, so I did some poking around and found Noisli, which is great. Then I realized (naturally) that I could fairly easily make my own local version, no network access required.
It’s called Atmosphere, a Python script that takes a config file like this:
# Sound path
/path/to/that/directory/with/sound/files
# Volumes (>1 = louder, <1 = quieter)
# Don't include extension
brook 0.3
crickets 0.9
fireplace 1.2
forest_rain 1.1
thunder1 1.3
thunder2 1.3
waves 0.05
wind 1.2
And then mixes the looped audio together via Sox. The current version isn’t perfect at all — it can use more CPU than I’d like, and I think it might work better as a menu bar application than as a command-line script — but it works. I’ve been using it for several months now.