Ambient Loops — User Manual

1 · What Ambient Loops is

Ambient Loops is a live mixing board for background music. You give it a word or phrase as a seed, pick a mood, and it composes and synthesizes a piece of calm instrumental music in your browser — then hands you the board and lets you keep mixing while it plays.

It makes one kind of music: slow, consonant, drum-free ambient built from four layers — a pad (the chord bed), a bass (one root note per bar), a melody (sparse in-key notes) and a shimmer (occasional high bells). There are no drums, no vocals and no song sections. Everything stays in one key, so nothing ever clashes.

It suits you if you need:

• a bed that runs for an hour under a livestream, a shop, a waiting room or a meditation app
• music that sits politely under a voice-over or podcast
• ambience for a game or app that has to loop forever without a click
• a short intro and stinger that match a longer bed
• separate layers, or a note sketch, that you'll finish in your own editor

Every feature is free — all six lengths up to ten minutes, all instruments, separate layers, MIDI, loudness targets, saved setups. Nothing on the page is locked. The only thing that costs money is the right to use the audio commercially. No account, no upload: the audio is computed on your device and never leaves it.

If you want drums, or pop, rock, EDM, house or metal, you want Sonodrift Studio instead — see the comparison.

2 · Your first loop, step by step

1. Leave everything alone and press Generate loop. The default board is the seed my-first-loop, the mood Calm, 30 seconds, seamless loop on. In a second or two the Your track panel appears and the status line tells you the key, the tempo and the file size — for that exact default board it is E major, 60 bpm, a 7.6 MB file.
2. Press ▶ Play live. This is not playing the file back — it is re-synthesizing the track continuously, which is what lets the whole board stay under your hands. A small LIVE badge shows the key and tempo now playing.
3. Grab a fader and move it while it plays. Open Full console and pull the Melody level down to about 0.3. It drops instantly, mid-note. Push Space up to 0.7 and the room opens around the pad.
4. Now change something musical. Set Key to G. The badge changes to moving to G … at the next bar, and a second or two later the music modulates — it doesn't stop, glitch or restart. Same for Mood, Energy, Tempo and the instrument menus.
5. Watch the download catch up. As soon as you move anything, WAV goes amber and reads updating…. About a second after you stop fiddling, the file re-renders in the background to match what you're hearing. Then press ↓ WAV.
6. Before you ship it, press Preview seam. This stops the live stream and plays the actual downloadable file starting 2.5 seconds before the end, looping, so you hear the exact wrap point. It stops itself after about six seconds.

That's the whole loop of using the tool: generate once, go live, mix by ear, download.

3 · Mood

The Mood menu is the single biggest decision. It sets the tempo range, which scales the melody may use, how dense the melody is by default, whether chords are three-note or four-note, how low the layers sit, and — importantly — whether the shimmer layer exists at all.

Read the table this way. Ambient is the slowest, sparsest and airiest — its melody sits an octave higher than the others. Deep is the darkest: it is the only mood that can land in phrygian, and its pad sits a whole octave lower than everything else. Uplift is nearly twice the tempo of Ambient with two and a half times the melody notes. Focus and Warm are the two moods with no shimmer at all.

4 · Seed

The Seed is any text you like — lobby-01, rainy tuesday, your project name. It is the fingerprint of the track: the same seed with the same board settings produces the identical audio, every time, on any machine, forever.

When the musical menus are left on Auto, the seed decides the key, the scale, the exact tempo within the mood's range, which chord progressions get drawn, where each melody note lands and where the shimmer falls.

The dice button next to the field drops in a random eight-character seed. It is the fastest way to audition variety: press dice, listen, press dice again. Everything else on the board stays exactly where you left it, so you are comparing compositions, not mixes.

Your seed also names the files you download. Letters, numbers, dots, hyphens and underscores are kept as they are; any other character becomes an underscore in the file name. The seed itself is never altered — a seed with a slash in it still generates its own distinct track.

5 · Length and seamless loops

Length is a row of six fixed buttons: 15s · 30s · 60s · 2 min · 5 min · 10 min. The default is 30 seconds, and all six are free.

*Measured on a development machine; your browser and device will differ, often by a lot. Bar counts change with tempo — a slower mood fits fewer bars into the same seconds.

seamless loop (ticked by default) is what makes the file safe to run forever. The generator renders the track's natural continuation past the end and folds two seconds of it back over the beginning, so the reverb wash flows across the join and the loop point is inaudible. Untick it and you get a plain one-shot cut with a 30-millisecond fade at each end instead — the right choice for an intro or a stinger that plays once.

Prove it before you ship. Preview seam plays the real downloadable file from 2.5 seconds before its end with looping on, so you hear the wrap exactly as a player will. The button only appears when the take you rendered had seamless loop ticked.

Two honest consequences of the fold:

• The first two seconds of the file are a blend of the ending and the beginning. On a 30-second loop that is fine; on a 15-second loop it is more than a tenth of the track, and the opening can feel washier than the body. For looping beds, 30 seconds and up behaves best.
• That opening is designed to be arrived at from the end, not from silence. If you need a clean cold start, untick seamless loop or use the theme-pack cuts, which are rendered without the fold.

Downloads are WAV, and only WAV, deliberately. MP3 and AAC encoders pad every file with a sliver of silence, which is exactly what breaks gapless looping — the seam this tool worked to hide comes back as an audible tick. A WAV loops sample-exactly in a game engine, a video editor or an app. If a platform forces you to hand over MP3, encode it yourself and expect the gap to return.

A recipe — a bed for a stream or a long video. Mood Calm or Focus, length 2–5 minutes, seamless loop on, Energy low (0.15–0.25). Press Preview seam and listen for a level jump or a swallowed reverb tail. Download the WAV, set your player to loop it, and it will run for hours.

6 · Feel: the four core faders

These four live in the Feel panel, always visible. They are the ones worth learning.

Energy is a melody-only control, and it is worth being blunt about that: it changes the chance of a melody note on each beat and nothing else. The pad and bass are unaffected. On a 60-second Calm loop, measured across forty seeds: at the minimum 0.02 you get roughly 0–4 notes in the whole minute; at the default 0.18, about 5–18; at 0.5, about 20–40; at the maximum 0.95, about 45–60. Note that the bottom of the fader thins the melody to roughly a note a minute rather than silencing it — if you want a guaranteed pad-and-bass drone, untick the Melody strip instead.

Motion makes long tracks evolve instead of repeating one texture forever. A slow, seeded wave — one full cycle every 12 to 20 bars, which at Calm's tempo is roughly one to one and a half minutes — pushes three things at once: the melody's busyness, the level of the pad and melody, and how likely shimmer is. At Motion 1 the pad and melody swell and recede by up to about 6 dB from peak to trough, and the melody's density swings between roughly a tenth and nearly twice your Energy setting. The bass deliberately does not breathe — it is the anchor.

Be realistic about Motion. On a 15- or 30-second loop the cycle barely gets started and you may hear nothing at all. It earns its keep from about two minutes upward. Set it to 0 for a completely static texture.

Space is the reverb send. At the default 0.30 it is a discreet room; at 1.0 the wet signal reaches half the level of the dry, which is a big, washy hall. Two things to know: the bass is never reverberated (reverberated low end turns to mud), and Space is the one Feel control that is heard instantly while playing.

Brightness tilts the tone. 0.5 is exactly neutral; below that the harmonics above each note's fundamental are pulled down, above that they are pushed up. Because the fundamental is never touched, instruments with few or weak upper harmonics change least — Sub bass, which is almost a pure tone, hardly responds at all, while Strings, Cello section and Pipe organ change dramatically.

Voice-over bed

The small button in the Feel header sets six controls in one click, for music that sits under speech: Melody 0.35, Shimmer 0.25, Space 0.22, Brightness 0.40, Stereo width 0.85, Bass 0.90. It leaves the pad and everything musical alone, and it opens the Full console so you can see what moved. Press it while your voice track is playing over the top and you will hear the bed drop into place underneath. It does not touch Energy — if the melody is still too busy, pull Energy down as well.

7 · The four channel strips

Open Full console and the top block is four channel strips, one per layer: Pad, Bass, Melody, Shimmer. Each strip has three things.

The enable checkbox (top right of the strip). Unticking it is an exact mute, and an honest one — the layer disappears from the live sound, from the downloaded file and from that layer's separate export. It is not a preview-only button.

The instrument menu. Each layer has its own catalog, split into Abstract (synthetic voices) and Instruments (emulations of real instruments). All of them are synthesized in your browser.

Swapping an instrument does not restart anything — the new voice arrives at the next bar with a short crossfade, on the same notes, so it reads as a morph rather than a cut. The alternates are tuned to sit at comparable loudness, so switching does not wreck your mix.

The level fader, 0 to 1, default 1 for all four. Instant, live, no re-render.

Two recipes

• Warm cinematic bed: Mood Deep, Pad Cello section, Bass Upright bass, Melody Soft piano, Energy about 0.12, Space 0.5. Listen for the pad sitting an octave lower than usual — that is Deep's doing.
• Music-box lullaby: Mood Calm, Melody Music box, Shimmer Celesta, Energy 0.35, Brightness 0.6, Space 0.55.

Stereo width

Underneath the strips: Stereo width, 0 to 1.5, default 1 (neutral). 0 collapses the mix to mono, which is what you want if the audio might be played back on a single speaker; above 1 it pushes the sides out, up to 1.5.

Honest limit: width works on the difference between the two channels, and the bass sits dead center with no detuning, so widening or narrowing does almost nothing to it. The pad and shimmer respond most.

8 · Tone: frequency range and the equalizer

Low cut and High cut

These two set the frequency range the whole loop is allowed to occupy. Both read off at their defaults (fully open, 20 Hz to 20 kHz), and they can meet but never cross.

They are not conventional filters — each is applied to the harmonics as they are generated, so they cannot ring or smear the way a filter does. Dragging one across a harmonic fades it out over about half an octave rather than popping it.

Useful positions, since the sliders are logarithmic and read off until you move them:

Concrete uses: Low cut around 0.25 (roughly 110 Hz) thins the bass for laptop and phone speakers and stops the bed rumbling under a voice. High cut around 0.8 (roughly 5 kHz) makes the whole loop sound like it is playing in the next room — a genuinely nice effect on Deep and Ambient. Both settle in about four tenths of a second rather than instantly.

Equalizer and spectrum

Five vertical faders, each −12 dB to +12 dB, centered at 0 dB: Low 120 Hz, Low-mid 400 Hz, Mid 1.2 kHz, High-mid 3.5 kHz, High 8 kHz. These are instant while playing.

Above them, the spectrum display shows each band's live output level. It is a real meter, tapped from the final output after the equalizer — move a fader and watch its own bar answer. It reads roughly −60 dB at the bottom to −6 dB at the top, and ambient beds naturally live around the middle of that.

One thing to expect: the bars only move during Play live. They sit idle during Preview seam, because that is playing the finished file rather than the live stream.

For a voice-over bed, a small cut at Mid 1.2 kHz and High-mid 3.5 kHz — down to about −4 dB each — carves out room for a speaking voice much more surgically than pulling the whole bed down.

9 · Musical: key, mode, chords, structure, tempo

The last block of the Full console. Every control here takes effect at the next bar with a crossfade, so a key change while playing is a modulation, not a glitch.

Key — Auto (seed decides), or any of the twelve notes. Pin it when the bed has to sit under something already in a known key.

Mode — Auto, or one of six: Major (ionian), Lydian (floating), Mixolydian (relaxed), Dorian (warm minor), Minor (aeolian), Phrygian (dark). On Auto, each mood draws only from its own two (see the Mood table) — so if you want phrygian on a Calm track, or lydian on a Deep one, you have to pin it here. This is the fastest way to get a sound the mood presets will not give you on their own.

Chords — Auto (seed draws each cycle), or one of eight fixed four-chord progressions: I–vi–IV–V, I–IV–V–I, vi–IV–I–V, I–V–vi–IV, I–iii–IV–V, vi–iii–IV–I, I–IV–I–V, IV–V–I–vi. On Auto, a fresh progression is drawn every four bars, so a long track keeps moving without repeating verbatim. Pin one and those same four chords cycle for the whole track — more predictable, more obviously loop-like, and the right choice when the music has to be genuinely unobtrusive.

Structure — Loop (uniform) by default, or Intro–body–outro. The second builds up at the start (pad first, bass joining, melody ramping in, no shimmer) and thins out again at the end. Use it for a cut that plays once. Be realistic about this one: the intro and outro are capped at four bars each. On a 15-second cut that is most of the piece; on a 10-minute track it is about twenty seconds out of six hundred, and you will barely notice.

Tempo — a slider from 40 to 120 bpm, plus an auto tempo checkbox.

10 · Playing live, and what responds when

▶ Play live does not play the file — it synthesizes the track continuously, a fraction of a second ahead of what you are hearing, on a dedicated audio thread. That is why you can drag faders, repaint the screen and re-render a 10-minute download in the background without the music stuttering. Press it again to stop.

Controls answer at three different speeds, because the three kinds of change are genuinely different:

The reason for the third group: those controls change which notes are played, and a note already sounding cannot be un-played. So the piece is recomposed and cut in at the next bar line — which is where a musician would put the change anyway. At the default 60 bpm a bar is 4 seconds; at Ambient's slowest tempo it is about 5.5 seconds; at Uplift's fastest, 2.5.

About the LIVE badge. Between pressing Play live and your first note-changing move it reads plainly: LIVE — E ionian · 60 bpm. The moment you queue a change it switches to moving to G lydian, 72 bpm at the next bar — and it stays in that wording for the rest of the session, even after the change has landed and is playing. Treat it as "the newest musical settings", not as a live status light.

If you are not playing, the board still works the same way — it just re-renders the file about six tenths of a second after you stop moving a control, instead of changing under your hands. One caveat: nothing auto-renders until you have pressed Generate loop at least once. Before that first render, moving controls does nothing audible.

Pressing Generate loop stops live playback. Once you have a track, ▶ Play live is the button you want; Generate becomes the secondary action and visually steps back.

Preview seam stops the live stream and plays the actual downloadable file from 2.5 seconds before the end, looping, then stops itself after about six seconds. This is also the honest comparison between stream and file: away from the loop point the two agree to within the finest distinction a 24-bit file can represent. The two-second loop fold is the one place they differ — which is exactly what this button exists to let you check.

If live playback cannot start (an old browser, a blocked audio component), the page silently falls back to playing the rendered file. Everything still works; controls re-render between changes rather than moving under your hands. If audio stalls mid-stream you will get a one-line notice — your download is unaffected, and a shorter length usually fixes it.

11 · Downloads: WAV and loudness

The WAV

↓ WAV gives you a 44.1 kHz, 24-bit stereo WAV, computed on your device. It is named after your board — seed, mood and length, as in my-first-loop-calm-30s.wav. No dither is applied, and the same inputs always produce byte-identical audio.

The output can never clip: every sample is soft-limited, then the whole file is scaled down if anything got close to the ceiling, which sits about 1 dB below full scale.

The staleness rule

When the board moves, the download button turns amber and reads updating…. A background re-render starts about 1.2 seconds after your last change. If you click the download while it is amber, the file renders first and then saves — you cannot accidentally ship audio that is not what you were listening to.

Loudness

A menu with four options: Natural (default, no processing at all), −14 LUFS (YouTube and most music streaming), −16 LUFS (podcast), −23 LUFS (broadcast, EBU R128). It normalizes the downloaded file, measured last on the finished audio, and the live preview follows the file's level after the next background render — give it a moment before judging the change.

How far it moves depends entirely on the track. On the default Calm 30-second board, −14 LUFS barely changes anything (a few tenths of a decibel up), −16 pulls it down under 2 dB, and −23 drops it by nearly 9 dB. In other words: an ambient bed is naturally close to podcast level, and broadcast level is much quieter. An upward move is capped by the same ceiling as everything else, so this stage can never clip.

12 · More exports: stems, theme pack, MIDI

Stems (4 WAVs)

Renders each layer on its own — pad, bass, melody, shimmer — as four separate WAVs at their current fader levels, the same length, sample-aligned with the mix. Four small download buttons appear when it finishes. Drop them on four tracks in an editor and they line up exactly: fade the melody under dialogue, or rebalance without regenerating.

Also worth knowing:

• A muted layer produces a silent file — muting is honoured everywhere, not just in the preview.
• Focus and Warm have no shimmer at all, so their shimmer file is silence.
• Summing the four layers gets you very close to the mix but not bit-identical: the final safety stage treats the whole mix at once, which is not the same as treating each layer alone. The difference typically sits around 25 dB below the mix's peak — a shade of color, not a fault. If you need a mixdown, use the WAV; if you need control, use the layers.

Theme pack (intro + stinger)

Renders two extra cuts from your current track: a 15-second intro and a 6-second stinger, both non-looping, both pinned to the key, mode and tempo your current track resolved to. Same seed, same instruments, same board — one sonic identity in three lengths. This is the podcast or YouTube channel kit. You must have generated a track first.

Export MIDI

Saves the composition's actual notes as a standard MIDI file: one tempo, 4/4, four tracks named after your chosen instruments ("Melody — Marimba", "Pad — Cello section"). Note velocities carry the composition's dynamics. Open it in any DAW and re-voice the piece with your own instruments.

Be clear about what MIDI is and is not: it is the note list, not the mix. It ignores your fader levels, your mutes, and every tone control — a muted layer still appears as a full track.

Save them straight away

Every new render clears the extra download links and invalidates the previous ones — including your layer files and theme-pack cuts. So press the export, then save those files before touching another control. If they disappear nothing is lost, since the same seed and board regenerate them identically, but you will be waiting on the renders again.

A recipe — a podcast kit. Generate a 2-minute bed you like. Press Theme pack, then Export stems. You now have the bed, a 15-second intro, a 6-second stinger and four layers you can rebalance under narration — all from one seed, all in the same key.

13 · Session tools: A/B, presets, Copy link

Set A / Apply A / Set B / Apply B. Capture two complete board setups and flip between them instantly, including while playing. This is how you make a real decision between two mixes instead of trusting your memory of the one you heard thirty seconds ago. The Apply buttons stay greyed out until you have captured something. The panel calls A/B "ephemeral", but in practice both slots are stored in your browser and survive a page reload, exactly like the named setups below.

Save preset. Type a name, press Save preset, and the whole board is stored on this device. Saved setups appear as buttons underneath — click one to load it, click its ✕ to delete it. Re-using an existing name overwrites it. These live in this browser on this machine only; they do not sync anywhere and they are not in the downloaded files.

Copy link. Encodes the entire board — seed, mood, length, every fader, every instrument, every mute, key, mode, chords, structure, tempo, loudness — into a web address and copies it. Anyone who opens it gets your exact board, and because the engine is deterministic, generating from it produces the identical audio. Nothing is generated automatically at the other end: they press Generate loop. This is the reliable way to hand a track to a collaborator, or to keep a setup somewhere that is not one browser's storage. If the clipboard is blocked, a box appears with the address to copy by hand.

Two details. Because the tempo is pinned out of the box, every link carries a tempo — a link arriving with 60 bpm is the factory state, not necessarily a deliberate choice by the sender. And a hand-edited link with impossible values is repaired rather than obeyed, so a mangled address cannot quietly gouge a hole in someone's frequency range.

All three tools capture the board, not the audio — they are tiny, and they are exact.

14 · What it costs

Every feature on the page is free for personal use. There is no account, no watermark, no ad, and nothing is uploaded.

The license covers client work, monetized video, podcasts, livestreams, games, apps and venue playback, with no limit on how many projects or how much they earn, and it covers everything the board exports — loops, layers, theme packs and MIDI. It is a purchase, not a subscription, so work you have already published can never lose its license. No attribution is ever required, free or licensed.

A $49 Sonodrift Studio license also covers everything the $19 one does, so if you expect to use both tools commercially, buy that one instead.

The one restriction, free or licensed: do not resell or redistribute the raw audio as audio — no republishing generated tracks as a stock-music library, sample pack or competing catalog. Use them in things; do not sell them as the thing.

What you will see today. The Commercial license button opens a panel listing what the license grants; in this build it reports that commercial licenses open soon and the tool stays fully free in the meantime, with a box to enter a code if you already have one. When checkout goes live, payment is handled on Stripe's own pages and your unlock code appears immediately after purchase.

Unlock codes. A purchase is fulfilled with a short code — three groups, hyphens included, in an alphabet that leaves out the characters that look alike, so it reads cleanly out of an email or over the phone. Open the Commercial license panel, expand Already have a code?, type it in and press Unlock. Lowercase is fine and stray spaces are trimmed, but the hyphens matter. Both an Ambience code and a Studio code are accepted here. The code is stored in the browser you typed it into, so enter it once per browser and per device; a private window forgets it, and clearing this site's data loses it. Keep the receipt email — re-entering the same code is how you restore it. Nothing visible changes when you unlock, because nothing here was gated.

The full terms, including the 14-day refund, are on the License page. None of this is legal advice, and it does not replace it for high-stakes use.

15 · Ambient Loops or Studio?

They are two different products on two different engines, and the pricing works in opposite directions.

Use Ambient Loops when you want background music: long beds, meditation and focus tracks, hold music, shop and venue ambience, podcast beds, game ambience — anything that has to loop for an hour without being noticed. You get ten-minute renders, separate layers and MIDI without paying anything.

Use Studio when you want music with a beat and a genre — something a listener is meant to notice. That is the only place drums exist.

One overlap worth calling out: Studio has an Ambient style too. But Studio's free tier caps every render at 30 seconds, so for actual long ambient beds — the whole point of a bed — Ambient Loops is the better tool even if you own a Studio license.

16 · Honest limits and troubleshooting

Things that genuinely do nothing, so you don't waste time on them

• On Focus and Warm, the shimmer layer produces no notes at all. Its fader, its instrument menu and its enable box have no effect, and its exported file is silence. If you want shimmer on a mid-tempo track, use Calm or Uplift.
• Energy only changes the melody. It will not thicken the pad or make the bass busier.
• Stereo width barely touches the bass, which is centered and undetuned by design.
• Brightness barely touches Sub bass, which is nearly a pure tone with no upper harmonics to tilt.
• Space never touches the bass — low end is deliberately kept out of the reverb.

Things that are subtler than they sound

• Motion needs length to show itself. Its cycle runs one to one and a half minutes; on a 15- or 30-second loop you may hear nothing. It is a control for tracks of two minutes and up.
• Intro–body–outro is capped at four bars at each end — obvious on a 15-second cut, nearly invisible on a 10-minute one.
• The spectrum meters only move during Play live, not during Preview seam and not while stopped.
• The minimum Energy setting thins the melody to roughly a note a minute; it does not silence it. Untick the Melody strip for a true drone.

Things that are fixed by design

• No drums, no percussion, no vocals, and no way to add them. That is Studio.
• Chords are drawn from eight conservative four-chord progressions. No custom progressions.
• Every note in a track stays in one key — the music will never surprise you, which is the point. Changing Key live is a real modulation, but a track never modulates on its own.
• Six length buttons only. No arbitrary durations.
• Downloads are WAV only, because compressed formats pad files with silence and break gapless looping.
• Saved setups and A/B slots live in one browser on one device. Use Copy link if a setup needs to travel.

If something looks wrong

• Nothing happens when I move a control. You have not pressed Generate loop yet. Nothing auto-renders before the first render.
• The music stopped when I pressed Generate. That is expected — Generate stops live playback. Press ▶ Play live again.
• Preview seam isn't there. It only appears when seamless loop was ticked for the take you rendered.
• The download is amber and says "updating…". The board has moved past the file. Wait about a second, or just click it — it renders first, then saves.
• The LIVE badge still says "moving to … at the next bar". The change has already landed; the wording simply does not reset. Read it as the newest settings.
• Audio is stalling. You will get a notice saying so. Your download is unaffected; try a shorter length, or mix from the file instead of the live stream.
• A long render is taking forever. The status line shows a running percentage on every render, and the Cancel button next to Generate stops the one it started. Note that Cancel is not available while layer files or a theme pack are rendering — those run to completion, and they are several renders back to back, so start them when you can wait.
• The layers don't add back up to my mix. Check the Loudness menu: set it to Natural and export them again.

Open Ambient Loops