Don’t use Endel so I can’t say if it’s worth the steep price
It’s pseudoscience snake oil.
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Do you have the same opinion of brain.fm and the other products in that general space?
A website full of venture capital investors. That demands your sign-up for a free trial, while keeping their pricing nearly invisible on their website. Unlike their ridiculous yet very visible performance claims. Do I believe that sound or music can help with concentration, relieve stress and improve wellbeing? Oh, absolutely. “7x increase in focus” though? Utterly ridiculous. Not too mention all the data collection and tracking in their app privacy description.
And it’s all just 50 or 60 USD per year (subscription, what else?), truly “democratizing wellness by making it accessible to all”. My ass.
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Could you be a little less ambiguous so I’m clear as to your position on this matter? 
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I used brainfm in the past and liked it
I think it’s a big help to have a clear context switch like telling yourself “I’m in focus mode now” and audio changes can do that. By clicking the “play button”, or putting on a Spotify playlist
I tried Endel now and like the commercial aspect. It has lots of neat little tricks like automatically adjusting the sound based on circadian rhythm, or using heart rate from the Apple Watch (there is an option to link Oura ring now, but it’s still under development). The presentation is also pretty cool
What I liked as well was going from relax to “evening focus”. It added more gentle beats into the background which got me a bit more amped
Sadly the Airplay is broken for me and keeps crashing on my HomePod. And personally the sleep sound scene sounds a bit annoying with all the higher pitched sounds, so I’m more of a “nice sound of rain” kind of guy with apps like Portal - Immersive Escapes on the App Store
Gonna try it a bit more the next days. Don’t expect a crazy jump in focus on anything, but just an endless changing background sound is pretty cool, and they do seem to heavily update it with new stuff
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I don´t doubt, that it could help for the concentration to “switch off” your surrounding with music and/or a kind of the different colorful “noises”.
But I don’t see a reason to pay such a large amount of money for that.
If I want to concentrate, I put on my Noisecompensated Headphones, and listen to either Meat Loaf, Phantom of the Opera or right now to Lucy Thomas (great Voice!).
For me, it is more important to listen to something I already know well, so it could just work as a NoiseCushion, instead of forcing me into listen to the text or something like that.
There are even for the different Colorful Noises a lot of free or cheap sources, and everyone could even do something like this for themselves, by just record some Rain, a running water, or some Waves rolling up the coast somewhere.
Even a record of Street Noise could be helpful for somebody who is used to live in a large city.
P.S.: Post was a general reply, and not intended as a direct reply to @fairlydoughnut, sorry!
I don’t know brain.fm. As for Endel, their only “scientific” paper is sponsored by themselves. Maybe I’m not open-minded enough but I don’t have time to read through their “paper”.
The authors were employed by the company Arctop Inc. This study received funding from Arctop Inc., and Endel Sound GmbH. The funders had the following involvement with the study: Arctop Inc., was involved in the study design, collection, analysis, interpretation of data, the writing of this article, and the decision to submit it for publication. Endel Sound GmbH was involved in the study design and provided audio stimuli used in the experiment.
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I did a bit of reading around this area. Music - particularly music individuals enjoy - can improve focus and reduce stress/anxiety. Classical music is good, but only if it’s something the individual likes listening to.
I didn’t find any research evidence that Endel or Brain.fm (or similar) were any more effective than music in general. And for some people, silence is better.
This is my go to:
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Endel have a bunch of tracks/playlists on many streaming platforms. You can listen to those and see what they do for you.
In my case, some of them are enjoyable as background music. I generally can’t listen to anything too structured or with vocals as my brain focuses on that rather than my work. Those tracks do the job as far as that aspect is concerned. I can’t say I suddenly had the focus of a hawk, though.
Thanks for this radio!
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Do you recall where you saw the original sale announcement? I want to keep an eye on their announcements for a friend who wants it. She doesn’t want to wait for 2023 Black Friday.
It looks like it’s on sale sometimes in the App store in December when they’ve been part of its Christmas sale. I didn’t even know the App store had a Christmas sale or when they’ll have that again.
I think it was on their website.
Thanks. I’ll check there.
I’ve been using Brain.fm but purely for the laziest of reasons: I just want good ambient and or upbeat tempo electronic music playing while I work without having to spend a bunch of time on Apple Music making playlists.
As a neuroscientist, I’ve read nothing convincing about any of the purported benefits of music with specific beats/tempo/binaural capabilities that would convince me to advise anyone to run to these supposed methodologies to “enhance their brain”.
My simple advice would be to find something that allows you to work without much distraction and play it often.
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Endel has a Discord channel and their recent sale was announced there, so you might want to check there too. The link can be found here: https://t.co/1Tec6XWht8
Also, their app subscription when bought from the Mac / Mac App Store used to be cheaper than on the iOS App Store (at least as of a year ago), so you might want to check if the price difference still exists. When the subscription is bought in either App Store, it can be used universally.
Happy to have helped!
I don’t do a ton of QR codes but when I do, I want a reliable solution that looks professional. So far, QR factory has been that for me.
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Hearing that Endel is now running a holiday sale this week - 50% off lifetime access. (Looks like an in-app purchase and make sure the latest version of the app is downloaded.)
I will trust your research, because I’m of a neuroscientist. Anecdotally , there is really nothing better that works for my focus than the binaural beats. After about 10 minutes they almost disappear and I’m locked in. It’s wild. The only other list that comes close is the Battlefield 4 EA soundtrack. (Video game soundtracks always got me to play forever, or at least focus on the game).
I’m all in on the pseudoscience lol