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.
v5.0 [Jul 12, 2012]
- Dropped the price for fall from $12.95 to $6.99!
- Made several changes to improve the reliability of the version update process.
- The round volume, pan, etc., adjustment "knobs" are no longer monochromatic, but will take on the same colors as the buttons. The mouse's scroll button works as before to rotate the knob, but holding the shift key down multiplies the effect by 10.
- Added the ability to reset the Mood or Picture timer by double-clicking on the timer progress bar.
- Fixed a bug that caused the Mood Timer time to get set to zero after the first launch and shut down.
- Fixed an "Out of Bounds" error that could occur shortly after launch under certain conditions.
- Fixed a bug that caused the Audio Record window's "Record" button to be enabled when the window was first opened, before a file was specified.
- Fixed a problem with a temporary file not being deleted at the end of a digital recording under some circumstances.
- Fixed a bug with undo/redo in the Piano Keyboard window.
- Fixed a bug that caused the wrong instrument sound to be played through the Piano Keyboard window if the window opened right after SonicMood was launched.
