Bring The Rain, Baby
Posted in Paid Apps on 10. Sep, 2009
Now it’s time to talk about an app that I use every night when I sleep, called Whitenoise Storm. This is from the makers of the Whitenoise app. But this isn’t just some cheap audio loop of rain or a thunder storm like other apps or actual store bought “white noice” machines you’ll find at places like Bed Bath and Beyond…
Whitenoise Storm does one thing and one thing well; it generates rain and storm audio. Instead of just playing a loop, it plays different loops of certain sounds, such as the actual rain sounds. There’s controls that adjust the “distance” of the rain, which is the “volume” of it. Then there’s a control for the “intensity”. This one’s the most important. What happens here is that, at the very lowest setting, it plays a loop of extremely light rain sprinkling. Nothing special there. But, when you start moving the slider up, it starts crossfading the rain loop into a rain loop that exists towards the middle of the slider, a normal rain audio loop, more intense than the sprinkling loop. From 0% to 50% is the point where the first loop will fade out and the next loop plays at full. Then, from 50% to 100% of the slider is where the “medium” rain audio crossfades into a “pouring” audio loop of rain. Since each section crossfades, the result sounds completely natural an realistic.
But there’s more than just rain that plays. There’s also wind. Wind has the same two things goin’ on for it, a “distance” slider and “intensity” slider that works the same as rain.
The last thing is thunder. Thunder is actually one of the things that makes ALL loop-play-back machines or apps sound fake. Once you hear the loop after a few times, it becomes fake sounding. This is where Whitenoise Storm differs (including from it’s own “Whitenoice” app).
Here’s what happens with thunder. The “distance” slider does the same thing, it controls the volume (which really does represent the distance). The “intensity” controls how often thunder goes off. That, and the way thunder goes off, is what makes it different.
From what I can tell, this is how it works. The intensity slider determins how often thunder goes off. Could either be once every five seconds at 100% intensity or I don’t know… 30 seconds at 0% intensity. What happens each time, I assume, is that the app rolls a dice to decide if thunder should go off. Like a 50-50 chance. Then, two sets of thunder audio will goes off, one after the other. Of that audio, there could be 5 to 20 samples of thunder in the app. Some samples are huge crackles of thunder, some are rolling thunder and some are just unique, quiet thunder. And when those two play together, it makes for a very unique sound. And each sound is randomly chosen each time, so it’s almost unique sounding everytime. Now, I’m assuming this is how the method is, it may be more simple or complicated than that. Point is, it’s random sounding.
So the result you get is a perfectly tailored storm experience. From what I’ve heard from all “storm” sound apps or machines, the thunder goes off way too much. I mean it’s ridiculous. The only way thunder would be going off that much is during a tropical storm or hurricane (and I know for a fact, I live in Florida). Whitenoise Storm is the same way, but at least you can turn the thunder intensity all the way down to make it go off more realistically. If you wanna’ know my ideal settings, check out the screen shot.
Another great feature is the ability to put the “storm” on a sleep timer. Make it go off after a certain time. It offers very flexible amounts of times, from 5 minutes to 5 hours, ect.
But that’s a bad option when your sleeping. You ever sleep with a fan on, and your fan gets turned off for some reason? Your body notices that “white noise” stops and you wake up. That’s how it is if a storm is playing but all of the sudden stops. But here’s the great thing… you can tell the sleep timer to fade the audio out over time. It’ll fade from 100% to 0%. So you never, ever, notice the rain stop.
I have my settings set to an hour, and what’s great is that the storm “passes” out of the area, like real storms do. When the storm’s volume is at 50%, after 30 minutes, you can’t hear the rain as much (sounds like the rain has mostly stopped and the thunder had moved on). It’s such a great effect.
Every night for the past month since I got the app, I’ve been using Whitenoise Storm. I place the Neocell into it’s dock, which the output is connected to a stereo and to two speakers hidden under both night stands on either side of the bed and the storm plays out over the speakers. I set the bass of the stereo in a certain way that makes the thunder sound so realistic, I swear it sounds just like the real thing. All I have to do is dock the Neocell, open the Whitenoise Storm app and turn it off and the timer starts everytime. I’ll get woken up sometimes during the night by different things, and I’ll lay back down… when I realize “Ugg, it’ll take me a few minutes to go to sleep.”, I just turn on the Neocell, press the home button and touch the app to restart an hour’s thunder storm (the “reset” feature of the app is poorly design and is too hard to touch so resetting the app is easier).
This just makes my iPhone even more useful, I use it now even when I sleep. ******’ crazy.
Peace, J
