Playlists and crossfades

A Focus Room playlist is a list of ambience scenes. Each scene plays for its own number of minutes, then the next one takes over with a crossfade. This tutorial builds a playlist from scratch.

Start with an empty room

Choose File → New room. The Playlist tab says that the playlist is empty.

Add built-in scenes

Under Built-in scene there is a list with two groups:

• Focus presets (generated) — scenes made for Focus Room: Deep brown noise, Pink noise and light rain, Surf-like swell, Fireside, Forest stream and Night wind.
• Soundscape Atlas worlds — the worlds of the Soundscape Atlas app. Each one is labelled Generated, Composite or Authentic. Composite and authentic worlds contain real field recordings from Wikimedia Commons; they need an internet connection and stream the recordings when they play.

The text below the list describes the selected scene honestly: generated sounds are synthesized on your device and only imitate rain, surf or a café.

Select Deep brown noise and press Add to playlist. Add Rainy study room and Forest stream the same way. Every new scene lasts 25 minutes.

Set lengths

Each scene in the list has a minutes field. Type 40 into the field of Deep brown noise and press Tab. The line under the list shows the total playing time. The crossfades overlap, so the total is a little shorter than the sum of the scenes.

Change the order

Use the Move up and Move down arrows next to a scene. With the keyboard, focus a scene (its name or its minutes field) and press Alt+Up or Alt+Down; the focus stays on the scene you moved. A scene is removed with the bin button — Ctrl+Z brings it back.

Click a scene's name to play it right away.

Shuffle and repeat

Under Playback:

• Shuffle plays the scenes in a mixed order. The list then shows the shuffled order, and New shuffle order draws another one. The order comes from a seed stored in the room, so a shared room shuffles the same way for everybody.
• Repeat has three choices: Play once stops after the last scene (with a fade-out), Repeat the playlist starts again from the top, Repeat one scene plays the current scene again and again.

Crossfades

The Crossfade slider sets how many seconds two scenes overlap, from Hard cut to 30 seconds. Focus Room uses an equal-power crossfade: the outgoing scene follows a cosine curve, the incoming one a sine curve. Their powers always add up to the same total, so two unrelated ambiences neither dip nor swell in loudness during the change.

A crossfade never takes more than half of a scene. A few seconds before the change the next scene is prepared silently, so it is ready when the fade begins. When you press Next scene yourself, the change is quicker (at most three seconds).

Sleep timer

At the bottom of the Playlist tab, Fade out and stop after fades the whole room out after 15 minutes to three hours. Fade length sets how long the fade takes. The player shows Sleep in … while it counts down.

Save the playlist

The playlist is part of the room: it is saved in the browser automatically, and File → Save room file writes it to a file. File → Recent rooms… lists all saved rooms, so you can keep one room per kind of work and switch between them.