Sounds and music

The Settings window’s General tab has a Sound group with three rows: Sound effects, Music, and Vibration. The first two have a volume slider. The menu bar’s Settings menu has the same three as check rows, Sounds, Music, and Haptics.

The sounds are typewriter keys. Every tap plays one key at a random pitch. Commit buttons and the big screen changes click. Deleting plays the deepest key, slowed. Undo and redo play one quiet key. A share sound plays whenever something is sent from the app: a share to the community, a download, the share sheet. A startup sound plays under the typing hat on the boot screen.

• Sound effects covers every tap and switch in the app. Its slider sets the volume, separate from the music.
• Music is the soundtrack: four twenty-minute ambient tracks, one for each look, Handheld, Lofi, Flat, and Pixel. Music plays in the fig editor, the scene editor, and the pattern studio. The home screen is silent. The editors play the track of the look that is on. Switch the look and the old track fades out as the new one fades in, over one second. Each track keeps its position, so switching back resumes it from there. The pattern studio and the start screen play the track of a look selected at random. Music is on from the first open. Its slider sets the music volume. The check box here, or the Music row in the menu bar’s Settings menu, turns it off.
• Vibration turns the vibration on taps on or off. On an iPad the row reads Haptics disabled: no vibration hardware detected., and the Haptics row is not shown in the Settings menu.

Tap a row’s check box to switch it, and drag its slider to set the level. The choices apply across the whole app and are kept between sessions. Muting sound effects does not stop the music, and muting the music does not stop the effects.

When you leave the app

Music pauses when you leave the app, switch to another app, or turn the screen off. It resumes from the same place when you return. Sound effects stop with it.