About Tin Roof

Tin Roof started the way a lot of small, stubborn projects do: with a frustrating night in a hotel room. A travelling parent, a baby who would only settle to the whir of the sound machine that was sitting, useless, on a shelf back home — and an app store full of "free" white noise apps that turned out to be three sounds, two ads, and a subscription screen.

It seemed absurd. The sounds people fall asleep to are the humblest audio in the world — rain, a fan, static, the sea. None of it should cost $60 a year or interrupt your wind-down with an ad for a casino game. So we decided to build the sound machine we actually wanted to exist, and to give it away.

What we made

Tin Roof is a free, ad-free sound machine for iPhone and Android. It combines long, seamless recordings — rain on a corrugated tin roof is the signature — with sound generated live on your device: white, pink, and brown noise, pure tones, and binaural beats that never loop because they're never recorded in the first place. You can layer up to six sounds into a mix, balance each one, set a sleep timer with a gentle fade-out, and save your favorites as presets.

Just as important is everything Tin Roof doesn't have. No account. No ads. No analytics quietly phoning home. No subscription, no locked "premium" sounds, no notifications nagging you about a streak. Everything is bundled with the app, so it works forever in airplane mode, in a cabin with no signal, or in a nursery with the router switched off.

What we believe

• Sleep shouldn't have a paywall. The people who need masking sound the most — exhausted parents, shift workers, people with tinnitus — are exactly the people who shouldn't be squeezed for it.
• Calm is a design decision. The app is dark by default, still by default, and usable at 3 a.m. with one eye open. The best compliment we can get is that you forgot it was there.
• Honesty about audio science. We label a binaural track as a "3.2 Hz delta beat," not a brain hack. Steady sound genuinely helps many people relax and stay asleep; it is not medicine, and we won't pretend it is.
• Infants get extra care. Baby sounds ship volume-capped by default with a placement reminder, reflecting pediatric guidance on nursery sound machines.
• Privacy by architecture. The easiest data to protect is data you never collect. Tin Roof has no servers to breach and no profile of you to leak. Our privacy policy is short because there is genuinely nothing to disclose.

The name

Ask a hundred people for the most comforting sound they know and a remarkable number will say the same thing: rain on a tin roof. There's something about it — the shelter implied in the sound, the storm kept just on the other side of a thin sheet of metal. It was the first sound we recorded, it's the default preset, and it gave the app its name.

Where we're headed

Version one is deliberately small: the sound library, the mixer, the timer, the presets. We'd rather do a short list of things perfectly than a long list badly. When we add things — more recordings, more languages, perhaps widgets — they'll be free too, and they'll follow the same rules: calm, honest, private.

Questions, sound requests, or a story about the tin roof you grew up under? We'd love to hear it — get in touch.