(First, I’ve been using this app forever and loved it, then. But I finally upgraded to this expanded version last year and now I love it even more, because there’s so much more great content. Now, I rarely bounce between apps anymore—wish I had done this sooner.)
(Second: In my ADD experience, tones and/or brown noise is a great supplement to taking meds; i.e. Meds + Tones are a great combo. And this app particularly has given me the best results in terms of effectiveness.)
I frequently use tones, brown noise, etc.—I got into this stuff a long time ago because I have ADD and needed help with focusing for work, and with winding down for sleep. Needless to say, I’ve gone through a lot of apps… This app is by far the best app of all of them. The features and functionality are so well thought out and I just love this thing. I use it religiously for work (I lead customer implementations and whatever else, so my job is high stress, fast paced, and brain-heavy).
Brown noise is great and effective but what makes this app so much better than others I’ve tried is that:
— I can combine the tones with brown noise and control the volume for each (which is awesome).
— I can customize session runtimes beyond the standard choices.
— — Also recommended runtimes stay visibly marked even when you change the runtime.
— — Has an ‘always visible’ session countdown timer, which really comes in handy when you have to resume after a pause or just want to see how much time you have left in that session.
— — — Also great that I can control pause/resume and volume via the controls on my (non-AirPods) bluetooth headphones. AND can see and access the same from my apple watch and iPhone lock screen.
— The power-nap and sleep tones work great!
— You can keep the MORE DETAILS screen up so you can read about each tone while scrolling through them. This is such a great feature!
— — ALSO, if you were trying to look up specific frequency definitions in the HELP section while reading through tone selections, the HELP screen remembers your place when you click back into it.
— — By the way, the HELP documentation for this app is EXCELLENT. Not only does it include info on how-to functionality, it also has a lot of info around the science—e.g., the “whys.”
— Can choose playlist for background tones and it works great (I sometimes use this feature with tones—instead of brown noise—for non-work/errand/fun focus).
— — WISHLIST (for Music Enhancement): Wish for more flexibility here, like: Right now, if you choose a playlist, it dumps all the songs in one area and you have to weed through the songs and uncheck the ones you’re not in the mood for, OR you have have to clear everything out and add a different and very specific playlist of songs you ARE in the mood for. The is doable but the extra effort—for me—disincentivizes trying using it in my daily; because in my daily I have bigger fish to fry, so I just stick to my brown noise even though there are some days when I’ve thought ambiance+music option would be nice, “only if.”—(1) Minimally would be nice to just be able to have my selected playlists LISTED so I can just pick it, and the next moment be able to pick a different playlist (e.g., switch between high energy classical to another flavor of classical.)—(2) Another option might at least be the ability to dump songs into “folders”—just some minimal way to categorize song selections, rather than dumping everything into one spot. (I realize there’s a fine line between providing some practical, feature-enhancing music functionality vs. a full blown music management system! *g*)
— I can switch tones depending on what I’m doing—e.g., Most days I start with ‘Focus and Alert,’ then to ‘Concentration,’ then to ‘Critical Thinking,’ and the finally to ‘High Gamma Focus.’ AND if I’m getting ready to go into another heavy meeting, I switch to the ‘Confidence Boost’ tone—sometimes multiple times in my day… And believe it or not, it REALLY works—the extra confidence really seems to helps, while skidding into my next meeting and switching my brain at the same time. (Some days I’m just racing between deep-dive tasks: research & analysis—> meeting prep—> meeting—> meeting following-up—> FIRE! —> another meeting… It gets insane sometimes.)
Anyway, this covers the headlines of why this app is so great. And hopefully the extra details about how I use the app will help someone else, with common challenges, relate—especially if they’re on the fence about whether this can help them. One word of advice for anyone who is use to a simpler-looking interface (like my wife)…
To me, this app is user friendly and makes sense, considering all the features and functionality packed into such limited space (because the developers did such a fantastic job on this). For everyone else though, it could look like “a lot” and take a little longer to understand where everything is and how it works. But once you get oriented, you’ll get the hang of it pretty quickly. Point being, it’s totally worth it. Hands down—this is the best tones app I’ve seen out there (especially for the money) AND you can buy it outright without having to subscribe (death by a thousand paper-cuts)—I just can’t recommend this app enough!