Background sound is a small house library of instrumental loops that can play quietly while you read. It starts turned off: nothing loads and nothing plays until you turn it on. A theme author can attach a track to a theme, a story owner can pick one for their own story, and on your own device you decide whether any of it plays and can pick a different loop per story.Everything here is optional and free. Turning it on, choosing a loop and adjusting the volume never cost a credit, and none of it changes what the story says.
Look for the speaker icon in the top-right corner while a story is open. On a phone or small screen it sits in the bar across the top of the screen, next to the bell. Open it and switch Background sound to On.
Browsers only allow audio to start after you interact with the page, so the first click that turns sound on is also what lets the browser start playing. If a track was already chosen for the theme or story you are reading, it starts right then.
The same panel carries a Mute toggle and a volume slider, so you can silence sound for a moment without turning the feature off and losing your place. A one-tap Enable sound chip appears in the corner if playback ever gets suspended, for example after switching tabs for a while.
The Sound tab in User Settings
Open User Settings from the gear at the bottom of the sidebar and pick the Sound tab for the full set of controls: on or off, mute and a volume in 20% steps. The finer slider in the top-right panel and the presets here write to the same values, so either one keeps the other in sync.Signed in, whether sound is on and how loud follow you to every device. Mute stays local to the device you set it on, so silencing your phone in a waiting room does not also silence your desktop at home. Signed out, everything lives on that one browser instead: an anonymous reader keeps their own device values rather than syncing to an account.
Where the music comes from
Every loop is an instrumental track from a small curated house library, released under CC0, which means free to use with no credit required. Sixteen loops ship today, each tagged with one mood: calm, tense, eerie, grand, warm, adventurous, melancholic, mysterious, romantic, playful, sci-fi, heroic, dread, tavern, noir and dreamy. The mood is what you see next to the title when picking one for a theme or a story.While a loop plays, the heart button in the top-right corner lists its title, author and source next to the theme's photo credits. The button only renders when there is something to credit: a Pexels photo, a playing loop, or both.The full list, with a short description of each loop and effect and the kinds of story or study session it suits, is on the sound library page . Every entry has a play button, and the page goes quiet again when you leave it. The same page is linked from the Sound tab and from the theme music picker.
There is no upload option. The library is a fixed, reviewed set rather than user-supplied audio, which keeps every track's license and quality accounted for.
Picking a loop for a theme and for your own story
A theme can carry its own track. Open the Designer, go to Save theme or Edit theme, and the Background music section lists every loop by title with its mood. Pick one and press the play button to hear it at your own current volume before committing. The same button pauses it, and picking another loop while it plays switches the music. Closing the dialog returns to whatever played before. Saving the theme carries the choice to everyone who uses it.A story owner can also pick a track for their own story. Switch to Advanced mode first (the link near the top of the app), then open the story's overview page and tap the collapsed Story details block to open it: the configuration lane inside carries the same Background Music control, with the same list and a None option to clear it.You can also pick a loop for yourself while reading a story. Open the top-right sound panel on a chapter page and use Track for this story: any loop, No music for that one story, or Story or theme default to go back to what its author chose. This pick stays on your device and only applies to that story. The last twenty stories you picked for are remembered.The precedence is simple: your own pick for a story, made in the top-right sound panel, beats the story's own track, which beats its theme's track, which beats your active playlist, which falls back to silence if none of those is set. Leaving a story you had music playing on smoothly transitions back to whatever the next page should play.
Playlists
A playlist is your own, theme-free set of loops that plays app-wide whenever nothing else takes precedence - on any page, not only inside a story. It lives on your device only, like mute: there is no account sync and no backend copy.Build one from the sound library page: press + Playlist on any music card, then either add it to an existing playlist or type a name to start a new one. A playlist with a single track loops it forever. With two or more tracks, each one repeats a few times (about three minutes' worth by default) before crossfading to the next, in order or shuffled - shuffle never repeats the same track twice in a row.Manage your playlists from the Sound tab in User Settings: rename, reorder or remove a track, delete a playlist, and set its shuffle and repeat count. Pick which playlist is active, and skip straight to its next track, from the top-right sound panel - the same place the per-story track picker lives.
If a track leaves the house library after you added it, your playlist keeps the entry but skips it when playing. A playlist left with no playable tracks at all is silence, same as having none active.
Ducking under narration
Background music is meant to sit under the story, not compete with it. While an audiobook special is narrating, background music automatically lowers itself for the duration and returns to its normal volume the moment playback stops or you navigate away.
"Temporarily unavailable"
Background sound can be switched off app-wide for maintenance. When that happens, the Sound tab shows a plain notice, "Background sound is temporarily unavailable", instead of the usual controls.
Nothing is lost when this happens. Your on/off, volume and mute stay exactly as you left them and take effect again as soon as the feature returns, with nothing to redo.
Best practices
Turn sound on from the Sound tab first if you are not already in a story: the top-right control only shows the full panel once you know where to look, and the tab explains every setting in one place.
Use Mute for a quick pause rather than switching sound off entirely. Mute remembers your volume and current track for when you unmute. Turning sound off starts you from silence next time.
Preview a theme's track before saving it. The preview plays at your own current volume, so what you hear while picking is what readers with a similar volume will hear too.
Clear a story's track back to None rather than leaving an old choice in place if the story's mood changes. It falls back to the theme cleanly, with nothing to redo on the theme side.
Under the hood
The precedence resolver checks five levels in order: your own device-local pick for the story, the story's own track, the theme's track, your active playlist, then silence. A pick of No music is explicit silence and does not fall through; a playlist has no such explicit-silence value, it is simply skipped when it names nothing playable. Sound switched off wins over all of them unconditionally, and the levels are otherwise independent, so changing a theme's track never touches a story's own choice or your playlist.Your on/off setting and volume are account-synced values, the same mechanism basic account preferences use, while mute stays device-local by design. Signed out, sound on/off and volume are also device-local, so switching devices without an account starts fresh.The engine loads nothing and creates no audio context until sound is turned on and the required first click or tap happens. An id that no longer exists in the library, for example after a theme's chosen track was retired, resolves to silence rather than falling back to a different level, and the picker for that theme or story shows "Track unavailable".