Blanket: Ambient Noise App For Linux That Helps You Stay Focused And Improves Your Productivity (Version 0.4.0 Released)
Blanket is an application for playing ambient noises, which boosts your productivity, helps you stay focused or fall asleep.
The lightweight application comes with sounds like rain, storm, waves, train, city, coffee shop, fireplace, pink and white noise, and many others. Each sound has a volume slider that you can adjust, this allowing you to mix various sounds as you wish. You can also add your own custom sounds.
You only need to use the Blanket user interface to set the sounds you want to use. Enable the Keep playing when closed option from its menu, and then you can close it, and control its volume from a MPRISv2-supported tray applet, like the sound menu in Linux Mint, the Date / Time widget available by default in GNOME Shell (you can also use a third party MPRIS sound widget, like the Mpris Indicator Button extension for GNOME Shell), and so on:
Why use this instead of one of the many websites that offer similar services? For starters, this is a free and open source application. It also works offline, and it allows adding your own custom sounds. You can also mix sounds if you wish (although I guess there are some websites that allow you to mix sounds). And it's lightweight, and can be used without even opening the UI.
Blanket was updated to version 0.4.0 a few hours ago, getting 6 new sounds (waves, birds, train, stream, boat and city), and the rain sound was replaced with a new audio file.
The latest version also adds the ability to start the application in the background on startup, so you can use it without even touching its UI.
Other changes in Blanket 0.4.0 include:
- New sound icons by Jakub Steiner
- Improvements for sounds, UI and performance
- New translations and bug fixes
After this release, these are all the sounds available by default with Blanket:
- Nature: rain, storm, wind, waves, stream, birds and summer night
- Travel: train, boat and city
- Interiors: coffee shop and fireplace
- Noise: pink noise and white noise
Download Blanket
You can install Blanket from Flathub, install it on openSUSE from the multimedia repository, or use one of the third-party packages available for Arch Linux / Manjaro (AUR), Ubuntu / Linux Mint / Pop!_OS (PPA), Fedora (copr).
All these packages are linked on the Blanket GitHub project page, so visit it for details. Note that at the time I'm writing this article, only the Flatpak package has been updated to the latest Blanket 0.4.0 (yes, even the AUR package is outdated; weird, right? 😁️).
Other productivity applications covered on Linux Uprising, which you might like:
