MoodyRain

MoodyRain is an ambient soundscape generator for Linux. It is inspired by Rainymood, A Soft Murmur, and similar web services.

Table of contents

• Installation
  • Dependencies
  • Setup
• Usage
  • Overview
  • Additional sounds
  • Known issues and limitations
• Credits
• License

Installation

Dependencies

MoodyRain depends on yad, mpv, and vorbis-tools. On Ubuntu 14.04 and up you can install all dependencies with the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/y-ppa-manager
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install yad mpv vorbis-tools

Setup

1. Install all dependencies

2. Clone this repository or download the latest zip-file and extract it

3. Navigate to the extracted folder and run moodyrain

4. (optional) Add moodyrain to your PATH and install the launcher by moving MoodyRain.desktop to one of the launcher directories (e.g. ~/.local/share/applications)

Usage

Overview

MoodyRain comes with a simple yad GUI that consists of a sound selection screen...:

...and a systray icon:

From the selection screen you can customize which sounds to play. If you want to disable a sound you can simply set its volume to zero.

After you're done configuring your soundscape, start the playback by pressing Play or Save and play, the difference being that the latter saves your soundscape for future use. The config file is written to ~/.config/moodyrain.cfg by default.

To change your ambience or stop the playback, right-click on the systray icon and select the corresponding option.

Additional sounds

Moodyrain comes with five different ambiences by default, but these can be extended by placing additional .ogg files in the sounds directory next to the script. You will be able to achieve the best results with seamless high-fidelity loops. Please make sure to fill out the Title and Artist tags when creating your .ogg files.

For further information on composing your own ambient sound samples check out the Sounds section of the Ambientsounds project by Muges.

Please feel free to file pull requests to add more sounds to the repository, as long as you make sure to only use free sounds (public domain/creative-commons). Freesound is a great source for such samples.

Known issues and limitations

• Moodyrain uses a very rudimentary config file that will get confused when you add new sounds or change the order of the existing ones. I might implement a more sophisticated solution when I have some time on my hands. In the meantime please feel free to contribute pull-requests!

• Resource usage scales linearly with the number of sounds you choose. MoodyRain will launch a new mpv instance for each file. While this won't be much of an issue for most users, it might pose a problem if you are planning on composing a particularly complicated soundscape (with more than 10 different tracks)

• some yad builds suffer from a text misalignment bug. More details and notes on possible solutions.

Credits

I would like to extend my heartfelt thanks to all the original artists without whom this project would not have been possible.

In particular I would like to thank Muges for letting me use their seamless samples for MoodyRain. Please make sure to check out their project Ambientsounds, a curses-based ambient sound player with realtime-adjustable sound levels.

I would also like to thank orschiro for giving me the idea for this project.

License

MoodyRain copyright 2014 Glutanimate

MoodyRain is licensed under the GNU GPLv3. For detailed licensing information concerning the sound files in this repository please consult this page.