Chill 4+

This app is pretty straight forward. It has the most common relaxing sounds and they are also in high quality audio. The loops are seemless and ive found the sounds to be the most realistic of any other app of this kind. Paid or not. If you, like me love the sound of the rain or ocean in the backround, give this app a try!

Great and surprisingly effective little app for blotting out the sound of rowing neighbours and noisy kids when writing. I prefer "wind" and "Rain (heavy)" for this purpose. For general noise when less concentration is required, "city" is particularly good, with very evocative bustle. Interesting how I perceive the heat of the city, and the coolness of the rain. App-specific volume control is also very useful. Only thing I don't like is the splash screen, but I won't dock a star for that. Recommended if you need help to isolate yourself.

The sound quality is good, it has a fairly wide choice of samples and it works reliably for the most part.

That said, in this version there are a few issues that I've noticed. 1) There's a huge silent section in the 'Pier' sample (a few minutes in) and 2) In a few of the tracks you can hear the loop end/start cross over - particularly the rain-on-leaves sound in the 'Rain - Light' sample. This is quite noticeable as the sample begins to fade down, then back up again and get's annoying after a while.

I would also like to see a preference panel or options adding because: a) I don't want it to auto-play when the computer starts. I do want the programme to auto-run, it's just that I want it to sit on the menu bar and be silent until I start the sounds explicitly; b) I don't want the absolutely huge start-up splash screen showing.

So, overall it's a good app and worth the money. It helps hugely with concentration in a noisy environment (baby crying, office noise, etc). It needs some improvements and fixes to make it really good, but it's already better than the other 5 programmes I tried.