Foyer
Ambient sound you place around you, on Mac and iPhone
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The #1 reply to my Mac launch was "put it on my phone." So I did.

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Hey everyone,

I launched Foyer here last month. It's a small app that turns ambient sound into a place. You sit in the middle of a black canvas as a point of light, and each sound is a glowing orb you can drag around yourself: a hearth, rain, a stream, a city somewhere in the distance. Pull one closer and it gets louder. Slide it to the left and it moves to your left ear. It's real binaural audio, so with headphones on it feels like you're sitting inside the room instead of listening to a track.

The reply I got most often after the launch was basically "I need this on my phone." So I spent the last few weeks rebuilding it for iPhone, and honestly dragging a sound around with your thumb feels more natural than it ever did on a trackpad. There's AirPods head tracking too, so the room stays put when you turn your head.

Same one-time unlock as the Mac version, and it's a universal app, so if you already bought it on Mac the iPhone one is yours for free. No subscription, no account, no ads.

Mostly I'm curious what you all put on when you need to focus. Silence, lo-fi, one specific rain video on loop? And if you could build your own room, what sound would you want that no app seems to get right?

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I've been looking for something that feels more interactive than another endless playlist. Being able to build my own soundscape and move everything around sounds like a much more relaxing experience. I usually work with rain and distant thunder, but I'd love an authentic old library atmosphere with subtle page turns and quiet footsteps.

 The library one really gets me. Page turns, a chair creaking somewhere, footsteps a couple aisles over, someone quietly shutting a book. That's exactly the kind of room this format was built for. Adding it to the list.

the thing no app seems to get right — head tracking has no absolute forward. it infers a baseline from the imu and lets it drift. turning your head is the easy case. the one that breaks is slowly swiveling your whole body in a chair, which looks identical to a slow head turn. so the room either rotates with you, or re-centers and the hearth ends up behind you. the mac version had no head tracking to get wrong. on iphone, in a chair, that's the whole ballgame.

For me, it’s always been minimalist cinematic strings. Think Hans Zimmer style scores. Right now, I have to manually hunt down tracks and build my own playlists for this because ambient apps completely ignore it.

Being able to actually build a "cinematic focus room" where I can position a low, steady cello drone to my left and a subtle violin swell to my right would be incredible for deep work.