Mix your own focus soundscape: sounds and music, together

I've wanted this feature since the very first version of FocusLive: a way to layer rain, a fireplace crackle, and a bit of café hum, then drop a lo-fi track on top of it, without leaving whatever I was actually trying to focus on.

For a while, FocusLive had two separate things instead. An ambient mixer lived on its own page, and a small music player floated in the corner playing one track at a time. They worked, but they didn't talk to each other, and switching between "background sounds" and "actual music" meant leaving the page I was working on. That friction was exactly the kind of thing FocusLive is supposed to remove, so it had to go.

#What's new

The floating player in the corner of the screen now does both jobs at once. Tap it open and you'll see two tabs: Sounds and My Music.

Sounds is a real mixer, not a picker. You can turn on rain and thunder and a distant fireplace all at the same time, each with its own volume slider, and one master volume controls the overall level so you're not riding nine sliders individually. If you'd rather not tune anything by hand, a row of scene presets (Rainy Night, Deep Focus, Cozy Cabin) drops in a pre-balanced mix with one tap.

My Music is your existing track player, now living in the same panel: play, skip, scrub through a track, adjust volume, all without switching context.

The part I was most excited to get working: both tabs run on separate audio channels, so a sound mix and a music track play together. One master play and pause button up top controls everything at once, so pausing to answer a Slack message doesn't mean hunting down two separate pause buttons afterward.

#Why this took a redesign, not just an add-on

My first instinct was to just bolt the mixer onto the music player as a third menu item. Sitting with it for a day made clear that wasn't going to hold up. A floating player that's meant to follow you around the app needs to stay small when you're not looking at it, and a nine-sound grid plus a track list plus transport controls doesn't fit into "small" without real thought about what's collapsed by default and what only shows up once you've asked for it.

That's why the sound grid only reveals a volume slider once you've actually turned a sound on, why the category filter (Nature, Places, Noise) only shows up when you're on the Sounds tab, and why the whole thing collapses back down to a single pulsing icon the moment you're done with it. None of that is visible as a "feature," but it's most of the actual work.

#A small technical note, for the curious

If you've used the old standalone mixer, the sounds themselves are the same library, just re-tagged by category and reused inside the popup. The music side keeps its own separate <audio> element, which is what makes running a sound mix and a track simultaneously possible in the first place; a single shared audio element can only ever play one source. Two channels, one set of controls on top.

#Try it

The player shows up on the timer page and a few other spots across the app now, not just tucked away on its own screen. Open it, layer a couple of sounds, drop in a track, and let me know what combination you land on. I'm always curious what people actually use versus what I assumed they would.