ZarkSeven

I’m a bit of a newcomer to the whole app scene, and when I saw the app called Ambiance recently, I thought “what a good idea.”  I’ve since learned that there seemed to be a bit of controversy surrounding the current version and the previous one, now called Ambiance Classic.  But I was oblivious to all that when I downloaded Ambiance and formed my impressions.

Premise

The Ambiance app turns your iPhone / iPod Touch into a portable sound machine.  Or as developer Matt Coneybeare says, an “environment enhancer.”  You can use it to play sounds to drown out background noise, or help you fall asleep, or relax after a stressful day.

There are hundreds of sounds to choose from.  You can make playlists of sounds, and the app will fade from one to another.  Or you can do mixes of multiple sounds, even sounds from out of your iTunes library.  You can set alarms, and fade out and in with different sound combos.  There’s a function to share sounds with another device, which I didn’t try.  You can tie the app to Facebook and Twitter, which seems to be all the rage these days.  Because everyone cares that you are “listening to ‘Rain – Leaves’ in the Ambiance app for the iPhone/iPod touch.”

Presentation

For an app that’s pretty basic in what it does, the developer has done a good job at making the app look professional, and giving a visual look to each sound file.  Each sound file comes with an image that displays when the sound is played, and the images are pro quality.

There’s a pretty decent system for browsing for new sounds in the app.  In the Featured section, you can browse “New” and “What’s Hot” sounds.  You can also browse by category in the Search section, in addition to typing in a search.  When you click on a sound you think you might like, you go to a page with a written description, and you can preview the sound before deciding to download it.  Ambiance sound downloads are free.

Interface

The controls are pretty straightforward, although at first glance things may seem a bit cluttered.  I find that with these types of apps, I play around for awhile searching out new things, then settle in on a list, and don’t really change much until on a whim I do it all over again.

I can see where some people might get confused with all the options.  As I said earlier, there are multiple ways to discover new sounds, located in different areas of the app.  There are also multiple areas to play sounds, from categories to playlists to favorites.  It’s not daunting by any stretch, but you do have to play with the app a little to get familiar with all the choices.

Freshness

Back 10-15 years ago, we had a sound machine that played 5 sounds – waves, forest, rain, wind and white noise.  We slept with it every night, usually on waves, and got very used to it.  Then we had kids and decided it might be better to hear them on the baby monitors than to drown them out with waves, so we stopped using it.  Now that they’re older, we’ve talked about doing something again, and when I saw Ambiance, I thought it was the perfect evolution of the sound machine.  We could put the iPod Touch in the JBL on Stage III speaker dock we have in the bedroom, and have a “noise machine” with a hundred times more options than our old device.

This seems like the perfect marriage of concept and device, whether you dock your iPhone/iPod Touch or are using it portable.  The ability to download from hundreds of sounds means that there’s something for just about everyone.  Since I’ve had the app the past month or so, there have been at least 2 updates adding new sounds to download.

Value

The app is 99 cents, and the sounds to download into it are free.  I think it’s a terrific value for what you get.

Controversy

As I mentioned, there were a few disgruntled users when the developer released version 2.0.  The original version was fairly different and by comparison pretty basic.  Sounds came pre-loaded into it, making it a fairly hefty initial download.  When you open the app, you see a wheel with the sound selections, that you can choose 1 or more of.

I’m not sure some of the “outrage” is justified.  Comments label the developer a greedy sob that’s just out to make more money, because he had the gall to significantly improve and upgrade his product.  Despite the fact that the upgrade was free!  People complain at how long it takes to download new sounds (which is speedy to me on wifi with my iPod Touch), yet they had to download something way larger to get the original app, and then had no options to download anything new!

Apprently, it was a “big deal” that you had to “surrender” your email address with version 2.  By now if people don’t have a junk email or some other account to use other than their private one, they have more issues than just with Ambiance.  It’s pretty standard these days that people ask for things like that.  I’m pretty sure I just did it for any number of apps just this week.

I think there were only really 2 issues: one was that when you upgraded to version 2, you lost the old sounds, and the other is simply that some people don’t like change.  But the developer made it right by making the original available, and made it free for two weeks, so that the people that preferred the original could go back to it.  The sense of entitlement people feel when they spend less than a buck just amazes me.  The original is still available for 99 cents as Ambiance Classic, but for the money I’d go with the current version.

Summary

Premise:  Superlative
Presentation:  Above Average
Interface:  Decent
Freshness:  Impressive
Value:  Great
Overall:  Terrific app