Free · no account · no ads
A study timer, 166 lo-fi tracks, and 81 sounds to layer
Press play and start. There is nothing to sign up for and nothing to pay — the audio streams from a public CDN, so this costs us nothing to run and costs you nothing to use.
25:00
Ready
Dusk Between Stoops
Chillhop & Cozy Beats
166 tracks from Open Lo-Fi, public domain (CC0). All credit to them.
Ambient sound
Layer as many as you like — rain under a café works well.
Rain
Nature
Places
Things
Animals
Urban
Transport
81 sounds from Moodist (MIT), CC0. All credit to them.
How to actually use this
The reason a timer works has very little to do with focus and almost everything to do with starting. Procrastination is mostly an avoidance response to a task that feels unbounded — “revise thermodynamics” has no edges and no visible end, so the mind flinches and finds something with a clearer shape, like your phone. “Thermodynamics for twenty-five minutes” is finite. You can see the end of it from the beginning. That is the whole trick.
Twenty-five minutes is not a magic number, and there is no research establishing it as optimal — Francesco Cirillo owned a tomato-shaped kitchen timer. Deep work often takes fifteen minutes just to load into your head, and a timer that interrupts at minute twenty-five is doing active harm. Use 25/5 for material you are resisting, 50/10 or 90/20 for real depth, and when you are in flow, let it ring and keep going.
As for the sound: silence beats everything, if you have it. Almost nobody does. What most people have is a room that is intermittently noisy, and attention is captured by change rather than by volume — a single unexpected voice takes more from you than a constant hiss ever will. Steady, wordless sound raises the floor and hides the variation. That is the real, mechanistic case for lo-fi, and it is why lyrics ruin it: they compete with the words you are reading.
Common questions
Is this really free?
Yes. No account, no payment, no ads, no email capture. Every audio file streams from a public CDN straight to your browser, so it costs us essentially nothing to run — which is why we can give it away rather than making you sign up for it.
Do I need an account?
No. Open the page and press play. Thaxas itself — the AI study app that reads your own course material — is a paid product, but this timer is not part of it and never will be.
How long should a study session be?
25/5 is the classic pomodoro, but 25 minutes is arbitrary — it came from a tomato-shaped kitchen timer. Use 25/5 for work you're resisting and 50/10 or 90/20 for deep work. If you're in flow when the timer rings, keep going.
Does lo-fi actually help you concentrate?
It's good at being ignorable, which is the point: no lyrics, little dynamic range, nothing that resolves and demands attention. Most of the real benefit is masking — steady sound covering an intermittently noisy room, since attention is captured by change rather than volume. If your room is already quiet, silence beats it.
Where does the audio come from?
166 lo-fi tracks from Open Lo-Fi and 81 ambient sounds from Moodist, all public domain or CC0. All credit belongs to them; we just stream it.
The timer is the free part
Thaxas itself is a paid AI study companion: upload your notes, slides and lectures and get a tutor that answers only from them, cites the page, and says so when your material doesn't cover the question.