If you want to relax or need to concentrate on a task at your computer then listening to ambient sounds can often help — and the best Linux app for this task just got a big update!
Blanket is a free, open-source GTK4/libadwaita app that comes packaged with a variety of ambient looping sounds. These range from classic nature tracks (rain, wind, waves, birds, etc) through to environmental buzz (coffee shop, city, train, etc).
You can play just a single sound or layer several sounds simultaneously by adjusting the volume level for each preset individually so everything sits right aurally.
Once you weave a soundscape that’s perfect you can save it as a user preset. This way, you can reuse/revisit it any time you like for instant zen.
Oh yeah, Blanket does regular pink noise and white noise as well — the gold standard in brainwave tuning static, and the app lets you load in sound files of your own.
Blanket 0.7.0 was released this weekend. This update overhauls the UI to deliver a cleaner, calmer, and more modern user interface that’s in-tune with current trends.
Additionally, the built-in pink noise sample has been updated, and a new sample for the Train preset is onboard.
Other welcome additions feature in the update, including the ability to inhibit laptop sleeping when playback is active and, conversely, automatically pause playback when the system enters power saving mode.
This version of Blanket also improves how it works with MPRIS (in Ubuntu this is surfaced through the playback control applet in the message tray). Blanket 0.7.0 adds support for play, pause and stop actions, and using next and prev controls will navigate saved presets.
That’s this update in a nutshell.
Get Blanket Noise/Sounds App
Sound good to you?
You can get Blanket from Flathub. This version of Blanket requires the GNOME 46 runtime so if you don’t have that installed it it will need to be downloaded too.
Alternatively, if you’re use Ubuntu 24.04 — already? get you! — then the unofficial Blanket PPA by apandada provides pre-packaged versions of the latest release (and most likely future updates) for you.
Due to dependencies the latest release is not available for earlier versions of Ubuntu from this PPA, but older builds are provided. If you want the latest (with the UI in this post) you can use the official Flathub build instead.