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Relax and Sleep - What a "Yawn"!
Tested version: 3.0
Latest version: 4.1
Requires Android: from 1.5
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Summary
Having a name like Relax and Sleep doesn’t necessarily make an app boring even though it’s supposed to make you yawn and rub your eyes. Today’s app is meant to help you fall asleep. Find out if this app is as successful at putting you to sleep as a late-night TV series in today’s test.
Features & Use
Everyone is familiar with that dreadful feeling of lying in bed, turning from side to side without being able to fall asleep. Even with your stomach full of warm milk and your endless counting of sheep, you still can’t get your eyes to stay closed. Nothing seems to be helping. Relax and Sleep is meant to come to the rescue to give a good night’s sleep.
Even though I personally don’t usually experience sleeping problems, I do have some meditation and ambient music in my CD collection. Relax and Sleep includes over 30 different sounds and melodies.
But that’s not enough to get you asleep, right? That’s why Relax and Sleep allows you to combine these sounds together and adjusting their individual volumes to create personalized compositions.
These compositions are meant to create an ambient relaxed atmosphere to help you fall asleep. First off, how good are these built-in sounds and tones?
In order to help you close your eyes, the audio quality of these sounds has to be good enough to listen to with your device’s built-in speakers because it’s virtually impossible to sleep with headphones on. Since most devices have pretty dodgy speakers in the first place, listening to low quality audio files on them is a pain.
In any case, Relax and Sleep makes an OK impression, although I wouldn’t call it great. While most of the recordings sound good, some of them need major improvement. Obviously, it’s always a challenge to find a good compromise between audio quality and file size, but some of the sounds are worse than others. My suggestion would be to increase the audio quality and store the files on the SD card. That way you’ll have more space on your internal memory.
What else is important? The different tones are played in loops. This means that each audio file repeats itself over and over again. The important thing is that this transition needs to be as smooth as possible. Does Relax and Sleep do that? Yes. Although the nature sounds are too short, the loops are seamless and smooth. It’s an entirely different story with instrumental pieces: you can definitely tell the transition. In combination with other sounds, it’s actually not that bad.
Which tones does Relax and Sleep have? Besides classical sounds such as crickets, rain, thunder and other nature sounds, Relax and Sleep also includes piano and violin pieces. The sound of a vacuum cleaner is also thrown in as a quirky sound (apparently it helps babies fall asleep).
You have to look through and find sounds that are relaxing to you personally. Enough about the sounds, let’s talk about the functions.
As previously mentioned, you can combine sounds together in any way you like. The app warns you from playing to many varied sounds on devices with bad speakers.
On the Motorola Milestone playing 10 sounds at once wasn’t a problem, but I started encountering problems when I increased this number to 15. Too many sounds do not create a pleasant sleep-inducing atmosphere. Thankfully, it is possible to adjust the individual volume of each sound. You can save and record up to 4 of your own compositions. Clicking on the star next to a tone places it at the top of your list.
There’s also an automatic composition feature. Select the magic wand and shake your phone. Although this feature works perfectly, these random sounds rarely sound good together.
What else is there? The countdown timer stops Relax and Sleep after a certain time. The app also includes an alarm with pleasant melodies to wake up to in the morning.
Bottom Line:
Relax and Sleep includes a lot of sounds with varying degrees of quality. The features are useful and the app may actually help some people relax if not fall asleep altogether.
Screen & Controls
The controls of Relax and Sleep are really simple. Just place a checkmark next to a sound to play it. Use the sliding tabs to adjust the individual volume. As far as looks are concerned, the app isn't well-designed.
Speed & Stability
All in all a stable performance for Relax and Sleep. Playing too many sounds together will, however, slow down your phone.
Price/Performance Ratio
Relax and Sleep is available for free and without any ads. The plus version includes additional features such as saving more compositions, adding your own alarm tones etc. The free version is, however, perfectly fine.
Comparable Apps
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Developer
Netherlands
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