Have you ever wished your job would send you to the beach for a weekend? Well, my job just did. After scouring the web for ambient sounds to purchase, all of which require complex licensing and thousands of dollars, I had given up on this feature for a while.
Then one day there was a thunderstorm in Atlanta and I decided to record it on my iPhone’s microphone. The recording wasn’t half bad, and it just needed some editing in GarageBand. Thus an idea was born! I could just record my own ambient sounds, and I’d just need to wait for some rain or the next time I was at the beach.
On September 11th, I decided to check on my favorite beach Airbnb in Florida to see when next they’d be open for booking. The only nights they had available for the next two months were September 12th and 13th. Being such an awkward window with a low likelihood of being booked, it also came with a 50% price discount! This was meant to be.
So I told my wife and kids the phrase every family wants to hear: “I’ve got to go to the beach for work, and you’re coming with me! We leave tomorrow morning!”
I should pause here and say that Santa Rosa Beach, Florida, is my favorite beach in the entire continental United States. I’ve been to a lot of beaches and nothing else comes close – temperature, safety, water clarity, white sand – Santa Rosa’s got the best. If you haven’t been, I would highly recommend it as a vacation spot, especially if you rent a house right on the beach.
I started every morning of the trip just before sunrise around 6:15 am (in my pajamas) barefoot at the beach with my phone at about knee height standing in the water and recording. I learned both from experience and research that this is the time of day with the least wind, and all my previous daytime recordings were spoiled with wind noise. I also learned that standing in the water makes for a worse recording than standing on the edge of the water.
Not many people would consider themselves lucky to have a tropical storm interrupt their kids play time at the beach, but that’s what happened on September 13th. I walked around our neighborhood for hours recording the rain from every location possible: tennis court, basketball court, garage, and the porch overlooking the beach.
We got lucky again, and the storm had passed by that afternoon. The kids went back out to play on the beach after a several hour reprieve of cartoons, power outages, and some epic thunder. After the storm had passed, we took a 2-mile family walk on the beach, and after that I helped my kids perfect their sandcastle building skills. We also got to see a squadron of US Navy F-18s as they passed by, nearly as loud as the thunder from earlier.
Why am I telling you all this? Because getting this feature out to you guys has been a huge adventure!
For starters, if I hadn’t randomly checked on Airbnb on September 11th, you wouldn’t have this feature in your hands right now or the really unique sounds like “Rain on the Beach.”
Secondly, the ambience feature is something I wanted to launch with our app back in May 2024, but gave up on initially due to high cost for licensing fees, but from my own testing, the Ambience feature is something that I really think ties our app together. The average price it would cost to pay for the ambient sounds I needed was $7,800, and the sounds themselves were nothing to write home about. It would require a ton of mixing and looping in GarageBand.
Back when our app was in beta, I used to turn on rain sounds on Youtube to play in the background when I had a focus session running. It was a Zen experience to watch our Digital Hourglass to the sound of the rain. And I LOVE rain!
To now have this feature out to the public, and to be able to share my family’s favorite vacation spot (and the memories attached to theses sounds) with our thousands of users is a personal touch that really adds some soul to Catch the Ghost. Pun intended!
My wife is Catch the Ghost’s biggest fan and our top user, and now she gets to hear her favorite beach whenever she wants. My wife is the polar opposite of me: free spirit, artsy, hippie, speaks 6 languages, hates scary movies. She’s not one to fake being interested in something I’m interested in, and if I can get her to love our app, I know I’m onto something. So even when progress is hard won and slow, the fact that she and the kids actually love it keeps me optimistic.
Believe me, having an idea is one thing. But the execution of that idea is a grind!
Ambience
Tap on the headphones on your Digital Hourglass controls and a control menu will slide up where you can choose your ambient sounds.
Our New Sounds:
- Rain (Santa Rosa Beach, Florida)
- Thunderstorm (Santa Rosa Beach, Florida)
- Raining at the Beach (Santa Rosa Beach, Florida)
- Beach at Sunrise (Santa Rosa Beach, Florida)
- Busy Cafe (Ponce City Market, Atlanta, Georgia)
- Forest at Night (Atlanta, Georgia)
Streak Recovery
So imagine you’re on a 40 day streak. You get sick, you go on a roadtrip, you fly to Japan. Suddenly you’re aware that you didn’t keep your streak going. What do you do?
Before, you could do nothing. Goodbye streak. Now, you can spend 5000 coins to recover your Streak. The moment you open the app we’ll give you an opportunity to recover your streak, and you’ll have about 48 hours to do so before the opportunity expires and you lose your streak for good.
Buy Coins
Our store is coming out soon. I know, I know, we keep delaying it, but for good reason. As a precursor to the store and our transition to a fully freemium experience, we are now creating a coins economy in Catch the Ghost. You earn coins, you can now buy coins, and soon we will have a store full of things you can spend your coins on. For now, you can spend your coins on Streak Recoveries, 5 minute Grace Periods, and Normal mode. So as of 1.4.5 we’ve activated these new in-app-purchases:
- 1,000 coins for $0.99
- 5,000 coins for $3.99 (20% off)
- 10,000 coins for $6.99 (30% off)
That’s it for now. We hope you enjoy 1.4.5! 1.4.6 is going a UI overhaul of our Pomodoro timer and an extensive rebranding, so stay tuned!
