Review: Sleep Maker
Score:
75%
The idea of helping yourself to get to sleep with an ambient soundtrack isn't new, of course - you'll remember I reviewed Sleep Machine - Thunderstorms a while back? Sleep Maker has the same idea, but offers a full fifteen ambient sounds, ensuring there's something for everyone. It's written in Qt and is a tiny bit cartoonish, but the samples are good and the timer works as advertised and.... ZZzzzzzz.........
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There's a main menu (Start/Help/Exit) to tap through and then you're asked whether you'd like a timed sound or an unlimited one. The latter, obviously, goes round the sound loops (each a minute or so long) forever, so for most purposes you'll want to set up half an hour or similar, long enough to get to sleep but ensuring that the sound doesn't play all night and either wake you up again later or annoy other house occupants!
The fifteen ambient sounds can be swiped (or tapped) through and each slides smoothly off to one side to make room for the next one.
Somewhat annoyingly, volume has to be adjusted on-screen, there's no support for the phone volume buttons. But the sound samples do work well on the whole and you can't (always) spot the joins when the sound is looped back.
In each case there's appropriate (and atmospheric) artwork, which is a nice (if inessential, given that your screen will dim and go off quite soon) touch.
Some of the ambient sounds seem somewhat strange choices to drift off to sleep to. Here's the full list, with my ratings(!), based on a couple of nights of sleep tests:
- Bird Song (nice, but perhaps more a soundtrack to wake up to then go to sleep to!)
- Brown noise (simply horrible, think radio static)
- Fireplace (think drifting off to sleep when camping, after a long day's hike)
- Pink noise (radio static again - ugh)
- Rain (actually heavy rain - you might find it restful that you're tucked up warm and dry, but then again with this downpour you may find yourself worrying about flooding - I did!)
- River (lovely and peaceful, a bubbling water sound, with overlaid bird chirps - perfect for a summer's afternoon nap?)
- Thunderstorm (the classic rain and distant rolling thunder - works better than 'rain' above, because the rain doesn't seem quite as torrential!)
- Summer stream (faster than 'River', with no bird song. Works OK, but may leave some people subconsciously needing the toilet?!)
- Distant traffic (perhaps aimed at those who grew up in the city or who are used to going to sleep with traffic, and who find themselves in a quiet location?)
- Train tracks (aimed at anyone who finds it easy to go to sleep on a train journey - the sounds of the wheels on the sleepers is quite metronomic)
- Rainforest (light rain, crickets, birds, the slithering of a snake.... no, scratch that last bit, that was my imagination! Not sure how well this would work, to be honest....)
- Waves (crashing on the shore, seems to be quite a wind. Works well if you like being by the sea, I guess, though you might want to turn the volume down a bit!)
- Whale song (don't think this would send anyone to sleep, to be honest. More likely have you saying "Someone please shut that bl**dy whale up"...!)
- White noise (more static)
- Wind (almost white noise in itself, any wind effect here is subtle at best)
So a few misfires above, but also some very nicely put together ambient effects. And, of course, each person's favourite will be different.
Although generally well implemented, there are some rough edges. For starters, your chosen sound isn't remembered, meaning that if (for instance) you want 'waves' each night, you've got to swipe or tap ten times every night when you start the Sleep Maker application. I guess you could keep the application running in the background, but it still seems inelegant that your preference isn't remembered.
And, being a little picky, there's no proper icon for the application (below right). Come on, Fumbo, you can do better than this!
One final caveat is that the quality of Sleep Maker's output also depends (obviously) on the quality of your phone's speaker (or headphones). I advise not to try most of these sound effects with one of Nokia's tinnier efforts (e.g. the N86 or N97 speaker systems) - at higher volumes these might prove very piercing. I tried Sleep Maker on the N8, with its excellent speaker, and found the results quite acceptable.
At a mere £1 Sleep Maker is excellent value - but do watch out for updates for it in the Ovi Store.
Steve Litchfield, AAS, 11 July 2011
PS. Having thus proved that I can get paid by Rafe for falling asleep, I've now got to think up something even more outrageous to review. Hmm.....!
Reviewed by Steve Litchfield at