Halotea Lite

Representing the lighter edition of Halotea, Halotea Lite is an application that can generate atmospheric sounds, such as crackling fire, jungle noise, rain, and waves. It's useful for people who have trouble sleeping without listening to smoothing, constant sounds. However, it can also be used for studying, working, meditating or performing other activities which require concentration.

What sets Halotea apart from similar programs is that it also has a built-in audio player, which gives you the possibility to play music with noise themes in the background, thus giving a special effect to the songs. Installing this tool doesn't take long but if you encounter any issues, check your PC for .NET Framework since it cannot work unless you have it installed.

As for the interface, Halotea Lite adopts a green theme and shows all noise themes in a list. If you select a theme, it automatically starts playing and you can make some adjustments to each sound involved in the theme. For example, in "Jungle" mode, you can increase or reduce the sounds of jungle, rain shower and woods.

You can schedule a timer that will count down to the moment of stopping the playback, which may range between 30 seconds and 1 minute, as well as specify the action to take when time's up, such as exiting the app, shutting down or suspending the system.

The atmospheric sound generator comes packed with a theme creator that enables you to create new presets using the existing samples or by importing sounds from external files (MP3, M4A, OGG, FLAC and other formats). Also, you can control the sample playback mode and settings (volume, balance, reverberation, echo, equalizer). The presets can be organized in distinct folders and groups of folders (e.g. ambient, nature).

Halotea Lite's audio player has standard controls, such as pause, resume, play next or previous track, volume and equalizer control, equalizer presets, echo and reverberation adjustment, along with shuffle and repeat. It's possible to create playlists of songs that can be played with or without the atmospheric sounds in the background.

The application creates three buttons in the systray at startup, one for playing and pausing the audio player, another for loading the next track in the playlist, and a third for quickly configuring Halotea Lite settings or accessing the main window. It gets minimized to the systray.

All aspects considered, Halotea Lite proves to be a feature-rich utility with plenty of sound presets and a versatile audio player that can be run with or without the presets in the background. It had minimal impact on the computer's performance in our tests and ran smoothly on Windows 10.

You can also check out Halotea Free, which doesn't have the preset and theme editor, nor the theme importing option, as well as the full version of Halotea, which adds an audio recorder together with theme export, preset import and export options.