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ANoise, or Ambient Noise, is a simple yet very convenient application developed by Costales (who's also behind Folder Color), for playing ambient noise with a click, useful for helping you stay focused, boost your productivity or, why not, fall asleep listening to the sound of waves or rain.

The application is very simple, lightweight and doesn't get in your way. In fact, it doesn't even come with a GUI by default and instead, it only shows an entry in the Ubuntu Sound Menu which allows you to play various relaxing sounds like forest, storm, rain, wind, night, fire, coffee shop or sea.

However, if your desktop environment doesn't support something similar to Ubuntu's Sound Menu (GNOME Shell Mediaplayer extension, etc.), you can still use Ambient Noise thanks to a little GUI that's was developed for such cases:

Despite being so light, Ambient Noise comes with a a couple of minor yet useful features. 

Firstly, the app remembers your last selection so you can easily start the last used ambient noise after a reboot, etc., and secondly, if you want the app to use custom sounds, you can simply add your own .ogg files in the ~/ANoise folder and the app should pick them up automatically. You can also add a .png file with the same name as the .ogg file and that image will be used in the Ubuntu Sound Menu along with your custom .ogg file.

For now, Ambient Noise only supports ogg files. Update: Ambient Noise now supports adding mp3 and wav files.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:costales/anoise
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install anoise

Once installed, simply search for Ambient Noise in Unity's Dash, click it and it should show up in the Ubuntu Sound Menu (with no other GUI), like in the screenshot above. This is only required the first time you launch it and the app should continue to show up in the Ubuntu Sound Menu until it's removed from the system.

For extra sounds (right now there's only one: river, but more should be added in the future), you can install the ANoise Community Extension, by using the following command:

sudo apt-get install anoise-community-extension1

Like I said above, for desktop environments where it's not possible to use Ambient Noise via a MPRIS v2 interface (like Ubuntu's Sound Menu or the GNOME Shell Mediaplayer extension), you can install a simple ANoise GUI:

sudo apt-get install anoise-gui