This is the pomodoro timer with its sound panel open and brown noise ready to play. Four ambient sounds are generated in your browser, with their own volume slider, and they keep playing across focus sessions and breaks. Your own music runs in a second tab or another app, and the timer still rings on time.
How to use it
- Pick a sound and set its volume. Brown noise, white noise, rain, or ticking. The first click also unlocks audio in your browser, which is why the alarm test button is worth pressing once before a real session.
- Set your minutes and press Space. Ambient sound runs independently of the countdown, so it does not stop when a break starts.
- Start your own music elsewhere if you want it. Spotify, YouTube, a desktop player, anything. The ambient volume is separate from your system volume, so you can sit one under the other.
What each sound suits
Brown noise is the deepest of the four, weighted toward low frequencies, and it sounds closer to a distant waterfall than to static. It masks speech and traffic better than the others, which is why it is the default here. Open-plan offices and cafés are the obvious case.
White noise is flat and hissier. Some people find it sharpens the edges of a quiet room; others find it fatiguing after twenty minutes. Try it at a low volume before committing to a long session.
Rain is filtered noise with the peaks softened, so it varies slightly instead of sitting still. It is the one people leave on longest.
Ticking is the odd one out. It masks nothing. What it does is make the passage of time audible, which some people find applies useful pressure and others find unbearable. It is off by default, and it only runs during focus.
Running your own music with the timer
There is no music library here, and there will not be one. Licensing music properly costs money that an ad-free site does not have, and your playlist is better than anything I could pick anyway.
Put it in a second browser tab or a desktop app and leave the timer in its own tab. The timer stores the clock time the session ends at rather than counting ticks, so browser throttling in a background tab cannot slow it down. Come back to the tab and it re-checks the clock immediately.
Two practical notes. Turn on browser notifications if the timer will be hidden behind a full-screen video, because an alarm under a loud track is easy to miss. And if you are using lyrics-heavy music for reading or writing, the ambient sounds here are a better fit; words compete with words.
What the research actually says about background noise
Less than the internet claims, and it depends who you are.
A 2024 meta-analysis by Nigg and colleagues in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry pooled 13 studies covering 335 participants and found a small benefit of white or pink noise on laboratory attention tasks for young people with ADHD or high attention problems. In the non-ADHD comparison groups, the same noise had a small negative effect.
For neurotypical adults the picture is thinner. Awada and colleagues tested 39 young adults in Scientific Reports in 2022 and found white noise at 45 dB beat ambient room noise on a sustained attention task and on a creativity measure, while 65 dB did not differ from ambient. One study, 39 people, one lab.
So: quiet noise may help some people on some tasks, loud noise does not seem to, and the effect for people without attention difficulties is small and inconsistent. None of this is medical advice, and the honest test is a week of your own work with it on and a week with it off.
FAQ
Does the timer keep time if I am watching YouTube in another tab?
Yes. The countdown is based on a fixed end time compared against your clock, so a throttled background tab does not slow it down, and returning to the tab re-syncs it straight away. Browser notifications are worth turning on, since an alarm under a video is easy to miss.
Can I upload my own music or sounds?
No. The site has no uploads and no accounts, and the four ambient sounds are generated by your browser rather than loaded as files, which is why the page stays small and works offline. Play your own audio from whatever app you already use and leave the timer in its own tab.
Is brown noise better than white noise for focus?
Brown noise has more energy at low frequencies, which makes it better at covering voices and traffic and easier on the ears over a long session. Whether it helps you concentrate is personal. Start at a volume where you stop noticing it, then leave it alone.
Should I turn the ticking on?
Try it for one session. Some people work faster with an audible clock, in the same way a visible countdown makes a deadline concrete; others find it makes them watch the timer instead of the work. It only plays during focus, never during breaks, and it has its own volume.
What if my browser blocks the sound?
Browsers require a click before any audio plays, so your first tap on a control unlocks it. If nothing plays after that, check the tab is not muted in the tab strip and that the site is not blocked in your sound settings. The countdown and the main timer notifications work either way.