I built Soundscape, a mixer for the Background Sounds on your Mac

I built Soundscape, a macOS app that mixes the Background Sounds built into your Mac. It’s free and open source, like NoteRepo.

macOS comes with 16 Background Sounds, from Balanced Noise to Rain on Roof. You find them in the Accessibility settings, and they play one at a time. Soundscape plays as many as you want, each at its own volume.

Here’s the app in 30 seconds:

Turn on a sound and it fades in. Add Fire on top of Rain, drag each slider until the mix feels right, and set the overall level with the master volume.

Soundscape remembers your mix. Next time, Play brings it back.

The whole mixer also lives in the menu bar. The icon fills in while something plays. Press Space in the window or the menu bar panel to pause the mix or bring it back.

Apple ships each sound as a set of audio files, 1 to 2.5 minutes long. Soundscape picks one at random and crossfades into the next over 4 seconds, so the sound never stops and restarts.

macOS Tahoe added eight new sounds, like Airplane, Boat and Quiet Night. On Sequoia you can get them too. Soundscape shows each one’s size and downloads it from Apple with one click.

The app doesn’t include any audio. It plays the same files macOS uses for Background Sounds. There are no accounts, and nothing about you or your mix leaves your Mac.

Under the hood it’s a SwiftUI app with no dependencies. The audio runs through AVAudioEngine.

Get it

The code is on GitHub at flaviocopes/soundscape, MIT licensed.

Download the zip from the latest release, unzip it, and drag Soundscape to your Applications folder. It runs on macOS 15 Sequoia or later, on Apple silicon and Intel Macs.

The app isn’t signed with an Apple Developer ID or notarized. The first time you open it, macOS says it “could not verify Soundscape is free of malware”. Click Done, go to System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll down to Soundscape, and click Open Anyway.

You can also remove the quarantine flag in Terminal, then open the app again:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Soundscape.app

The README explains what to do on a work laptop.

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