An ambient sound mixer desktop app. Layer rain, fire, ocean waves, café chatter and more on a free-form canvas, save the mix as a preset, and let it run while you focus, relax, or sleep.
- Two playground modes — a classic drag-and-drop canvas, or an "orbit" canvas where a sound's distance from the center controls its volume and its horizontal position controls stereo pan (spatial audio)
- Layered mixing — add as many sounds as you like, each with independent volume
- Presets — save, load, and manage named mixes, persisted locally
- Sleep / Pomodoro timer — stop playback automatically or cycle focus/break sessions
- Bring your own sounds — search and add sounds on demand; a handful ship bundled, the rest are fetched on first use (see below) and cached forever afterward
- System tray — minimizes to tray instead of quitting; toggle the window from the tray icon
Noisebox doesn't bundle a large sound library — that would bloat the installer. Instead, when you add a sound it's resolved in this order:
- Bundled — a small set of sounds ship with the app in
public/sounds/ - Cached — anything you've used before, stored in your OS app-data directory
- Downloaded on demand — fetched from Freesound (primary) or Pixabay (fallback) using your own free API key, then cached for offline use
To enable on-demand downloading, open the app's API key settings and paste in a Freesound and/or Pixabay API key (both are free to obtain from their respective developer portals).
Prerequisites: Node.js 18+, Rust, and pnpm.
pnpm install # install dependencies
pnpm tauri dev # run the app (Rust backend + React frontend, hot-reloading)Use
pnpm tauri devrather thanpnpm dev— most of the app's functionality (sound downloading/caching, presets, settings, system tray) depends on the Tauri runtime and won't work in a plain browser tab.
To populate the bundled sounds in public/sounds/ (gitignored, fetched from Freesound/Pixabay):
FREESOUND_API_KEY=xxx pnpm download-soundspnpm tauri buildProduces platform installers in src-tauri/target/release/bundle/ (.msi/.exe on Windows, .dmg on macOS, .AppImage/.deb on Linux).
Tauri 2 (Rust) · React 19 · Vite · TypeScript · Zustand · Tailwind CSS · Howler.js · dnd-kit · Framer Motion