Opal – listen to relaxing background music

Opal is a small utility that’s designed to do one thing — listen to relaxing background music.

It bills itself as a music player, but this is not a conventional music player for listening to your music collection. Instead, you can choose to listen to a variety of different sounds.

Opal is cross-platform software.

Installation

We tested Opal with its AppImage.

AppImage is a universal software format for distributing portable software on Linux without needing superuser permissions to install the application. AppImage doesn’t really install software. It’s a compressed image with all the dependencies and libraries needed to run the desired software. If you’re new to AppImage, read our Linux for Starters section.

In Operation

The image to the left shows Opal’s main interface window.

The app divides the sounds into different grouping.

We are offered a wide variety of sounds to listen to. Choose from:

• 10 nature;
• 7 office;
• 5 audiences;
• 4 radio frequency static;
• 6 other.

In total, there are 30 different sounds available. Each of these sounds has its own volume control. This lets you create your own unique custom sounds.

We’d prefer each individual sound to have cross-fading, as there’s a noticeable audible gap when an individual sound track recycles.

Summary

Think of the utility as a wellbeing app. The program is designed simply to help you relieve accumulated stress and relax.

It’s a way of unwinding at the end of a busy day and may help you get to sleep. The tool has a delay timer which terminates the sounds after a specified interval although this didn’t function when using the AppImage on our test system.

Some of the sounds could have more realism. For example, the rugby football track certainly wasn’t recorded from a Six Nations Championship game. And the memory usage is tragic with ps_mem reporting that Opal consumes 490MB of RAM.

As things currently stand, it’s hard to recommend Opal. Instead, we’ll pick Relaxator. While it has far fewer sounds available, they can easily be replaced, and its memory footprint is about 1/5 of Opal.

Website: codedead.com/software/opal
Support: GitHub Code Repository
Developer: DeadLine
License: GNU General Public License v3.0

Opal is written in Java. Learn Java with our recommended free books and free tutorials.