Rainy Mood is a very famous website/app that allows you to listen to the rain, air and thunderstorms sounds any time you want. It helps you to relax, or simply stay focused while trying to maintain your productivity. Listening to it on daily basis while doing your work or study for example can help you feel more comfortable in working for long continues hours. It’s a very widely-used app. There are many other websites too.

Today, you’ll be happy to know that there’s a rainy-mood-like extension for GNOME Shell, that allows you to listen to many similar sounds directly from your desktop. Its setup and usage is quite simple and easy. Its name is Focusli.

Install Focusli on GNOME Shell

Simply head to the GNOME Shell Extensions website and hit the trigger button to install it on your GNOME desktop. If you don’t know how to do that or if you are facing some error messages, you may refer to the first section of our previous article for more information.

After installation, you’ll notice that the extension is running as an indicator on the top bar:

rainy mood 5

In order to activate the sounds, click on the icon of the sound mixture you want, and control its volume. You can for example mix the sounds of rain, air and talking people together to get a different fusion that you like.

You can keep changing and testing different mixtures till you find the one you love.

Get More Sounds for Focusli

Focusli offers 6 sound types per default, but that’s not all. There are hundreds of other sounds that you can get.

In order to do that, head to the Roality Free Sounds website, and download whatever sounds you may like (in MP3 or Wav format, doesn’t matter). After that, copy the files you downloaded and paste them to /home/<your_user_name>/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/focusli@armonge.info/sounds/ (The .local folder in your home is hidden, click Ctrl + H to show it):

rainy mood 7

Now open the database.json file, located in the same folder. Its content should look like the following:

{
  "sounds": [
    {
      "name": "Rain",
      "uri": ".local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/focusli@armonge.info/sounds/Rain.ogg",
      "icon": "weather-showers-symbolic"
    },
    {
      "name": "Wind",
      "uri": ".local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/focusli@armonge.info/sounds/Wind.ogg",
      "icon": "weather-fog-symbolic"
    },
    {
      "name": "Summer_Night",
      "uri": ".local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/focusli@armonge.info/sounds/Summer_Night.ogg",
      "icon": "weather-clear-night-symbolic"
    },
    {
      "name": "Coffee_Shop",
      "uri": ".local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/focusli@armonge.info/sounds/Coffee_Shop.ogg",
      "icon": "system-users-symbolic"
    },
    {
      "name": "White_Noise",
      "uri": ".local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/focusli@armonge.info/sounds/White_Noise.ogg",
      "icon": "utilities-system-monitor-symbolic"
    },
    {
      "name": "Fireplace",
      "uri": ".local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/focusli@armonge.info/sounds/Fireplace.ogg",
      "icon": "keyboard-brightness-symbolic"
    }
  ]
}

In order to make the extension identify our newly added sound, we simply need to change it to:

{
  "sounds": [
    {
      "name": "Rain",
      "uri": ".local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/focusli@armonge.info/sounds/Rain.ogg",
      "icon": "weather-showers-symbolic"
    },
    {
      "name": "Wind",
      "uri": ".local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/focusli@armonge.info/sounds/Wind.ogg",
      "icon": "weather-fog-symbolic"
    },
    {
      "name": "Summer_Night",
      "uri": ".local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/focusli@armonge.info/sounds/Summer_Night.ogg",
      "icon": "weather-clear-night-symbolic"
    },
    {
      "name": "Coffee_Shop",
      "uri": ".local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/focusli@armonge.info/sounds/Coffee_Shop.ogg",
      "icon": "system-users-symbolic"
    },
    {
      "name": "White_Noise",
      "uri": ".local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/focusli@armonge.info/sounds/White_Noise.ogg",
      "icon": "utilities-system-monitor-symbolic"
    },
    {
      "name": "Fireplace",
      "uri": ".local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/focusli@armonge.info/sounds/Fireplace.ogg",
      "icon": "keyboard-brightness-symbolic"
    },
    {
      "name": "Thunderstorm",
      "uri": ".local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/focusli@armonge.info/sounds/Thunder.mp3",
      "icon": "system"
    }
  ]
}

Notice how we simply copied an already existing section in the JSON file, and simply changed the name, uri and icon for it:

,
{
"name": "Thunderstorm",
"uri": ".local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/focusli@armonge.info/sounds/Thunder.mp3",
"icon": "system"
}

Just change Thunderstorm to the name you want, and Thunder.mp3 to the name of the file you downloaded, and system to the icon name you want to use (You can leave this one as it is).

Finally, restart GNOME Shell via Alt + F2, and write r and hit Enter. You’ll now find your new sound available in the extension to play any time you want (You can also control its volume):

rainy mood 9

You can repeat the same process above for as many times as you wish; Mixing different sound types until you get the fusion you like the most. It’s really a fun experience to do.

Adding new sounds can be tricky for some users, it would’ve been much better if the extension offered a settings window to do that by simply dragging and dropping the sound file you want. But this should get you going for now.

To browse the homepage of the Focusli extension, you can click here.

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