Respect where it is due
A Soft Murmur got the fundamentals right years ago: free on the web, tiny one-time sound packs on mobile (a few dollars, no subscription), fully offline, nothing collected. The "meander" feature that slowly drifts your mix is a genuinely nice idea. It is the lowest-commitment product in this whole category, and this page will not pretend otherwise.
What the upgrade buys
Every mixer built on sliders shares one ceiling: all sounds play from the same place, the centre of your head. Foyer's canvas breaks that. Rain can fall outside a window to your right while the fire settles at your left and thunder rolls somewhere far behind, each sound at its own distance, mixed binaurally. Add AirPods head tracking and the room stays put when you move. Around that core: saved rooms, a menu-bar app on the Mac, a sleep timer, scheduling and iCloud sync.
Side by side
| Foyer | A Soft Murmur | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $9.99 once (Mac + iPhone) | Web free; app sound packs ~$1.99–$3.99 one-time |
| Mixing | Spatial canvas, distance = volume | Ten volume sliders |
| Placement | True binaural position per sound | All sounds centred |
| Account | None | None |
| Privacy label | Data Not Collected | Data Not Collected |
| Platforms | Mac (menu bar), iPhone | Web, iOS, Android (broader) |
| Extras | Rooms, head tracking, scheduling, sleep timer | Meander auto-drift, timer |
Prices and free-tier limits checked July 2026 against official sites and App Store listings. Tell us if something changed: [email protected].
Try the difference with your ears
Descriptions of spatial audio undersell it; headphones make the case in ten seconds. The free pages below play single Foyer sounds flat, like A Soft Murmur would. The app is where they spread out into a room. If the flat versions already do the job for you, you just saved $9.99.