SonicMood is a program for Mac that comes in handy when working in a loud environment and you need extra help to stay focused on your projects. This application provides you with a wide range of ambient sounds, lets you create your own relaxing music, and brings you an efficient built-in search tool.
The offered ambient sounds are called Moods and are nicely organized on the left side of the screen. From there you can choose the preferred audio file type and start playing it at any sound volume you need. The app also provides you with additional audio settings to adjust the levels for base octave, octave range, tempo base, instruments sound, and many other.
Another good thing about this program is that it also brings you an integrated audio recording tool. With its help you can tape any sound coming out of your speakers and save it for later playback in iTunes.
In my opinion, an inexperienced user wouldn't be able to configure the sound settings of this tool easily. In addition, you’ll need to have downloaded and installed the “Soundflower” system extension in order to record SonicMood in Digital Audio mode (it can be found on the homepage of Cycling '74).
Even though the program brings two disadvantages, I give SonicMood 4 out of 5 stars mostly because it brings authentic ambient sounds that are truly relaxing and suitable for a work environment. Playing these sound files really helps me keep focused on my work and ignore the noise around me.
As a consequence, I'd say it's worth trying this app. SonicMood is full of useful features, lets you make your own ambient music, and comes with a very reasonable price.
v4.9 [May 13, 2010]
-Fixed a bug that reliably caused a crash when dropping a Mood file onto the Mood List.
-Changed all "PICT" graphics files to "PNG" files since PICT files are being depreciated by Apple.
-Improved the way instrument (MIDI) sounds are faded in volume (diminuendo), the way panning works for both instrument and soundfile sounds, and the way soundfile play/fade/pause is handled.
-Added an "alert" red color to the "value" text of the Edit window's soundfile min/max play and min/max pause time sliders. The alert appears if the user tries to drag a slider past its allowed value. For example, attempting to drag the min play time slider to a value higher than the max play time slider will highlight the slider value in red and the slider will stop. In other words, the min play or pause time must always be less than or equal to the max play or pause time.
