Music while coding

I listen to http://www.gymradio.us/

For me music is a tool that helps me keep in the state, productive, with high focus and a positive frame. Depends on the time of the day I use different kind of music:

• Morning: Some rock/heavy, trance, hardcore, something to fire up.

• Mid of the morning: Excitement is building up and breaking concentration (I'm very sensitive to music), it's time to swap for something relax and constant, deep house, classical, ambiental, new age, binaural.

• After lunch: Time again for something fun with energy. On this time of the day somehow I prefer fun optimistic, Mika, Queen, Avicii, etc..

• Mid of the afternoon: Again, excitement starts to break concentration blocks, time for something classical, deep house, new age, binaural beats... Last week I tried Andy Timmon's version of Beatle's Sgt Peppers and worked fine.

• Night session early hours: Time for some heroic lines, you are doing a sacrifice, lets do it fun. It flows from Lady Gaga/Katy Perry up to Tiësto. I also try some Dream Theater (Illumination Theory, Octavarium, Lines in the Sand, Learning to Leave), sometimes Steve Vai's passion and warfare, Satriani's Surfing with an Alien.

• Night sessions late hours: Two scenarios, I need to do something heroic in the next 2 hours or I just have to finish something boring. For the first one, it's time for some BSO, lord of the rings, inception or any Hans Zimmer tune. For the second one, again, deep house, classical, binaural.

What doesn't work for me:

• Rap / Hiphop: It works on the short term. Good rhythm tunes, nice Drum and Bass. Problem is it takes my mind into bad non optimistic mood on the mid and long term.

• Jazz: This works fine for 20/30 minutes maximum. After that, it starts to bring up anxiety levels. Somehow Jazz complex rhythm structures affect my internal rhythm and breaks my focus. I enjoy Jazz, but not during work time.

• Blues: Similar to rap, unless I go with some high energy like SRV tunes, it brings my mind into negative non optimistic mood in the mid/long term.

• Latin: My mother tongue is Spanish. I understand what those tunes talk about. 99% of the time is about love, infidelity, betrayal, etc... This kind of music tends to take my mind away from work and into old chapters of my life, again, breaking my focus. Nice for dancing on saturday night, definitely not good for working.

• "Cantautor": It's a spanish word that means when a singer with an acoustic guitar only singing tales about life in a low energy profound mood. Same as Latin, those histories tend to be too deep, they bring me into the history breaking my focus.

• Country, Death Metal, Nu Metal, easter european folk: I don't think there are good or bad styles. Every style have awesome artist doing an awesome work, and the opposite is true, every style is plenty of junk. In this case, styles like death metal doesn't work for me, I've given them many opportunities, tried different artists, different angles, they don't resonate with me.

Would love to read your playlists and suggestions!

I listen to music while coding to block out other distractions, such as phones ringing, and other general office noises. As for the service. I use Spotify, I have done since the beta, and will continue to until I'm forced not to. As a user that listens to a minimum of 4 hours a day, it's definitely worth the money.

The playlist depends on my mood, if I want to "hardcore code" or just casually code something of my own. I usually just use Spotify Radio, or the Soundrop Spotify App.

Here are some of my playlists, a few could do with an update though: https://play.spotify.com/user/chrisg4620

@chrisgeary92 first song on your playlist I hear, Led Zep :D

@bagwaa - I do have some really bad stuff on there too.. Should probably delete the embarrassing ones at least ;)

I just use music to drown out other noises - i'll often just play the same song (or album subset) on repeat for hours on end. That way there are no surprises in the sounds about to come out. As to what I listen to - Massive Attack, Radiohead, Portishead, Justin Be...no not him.

Funk music all the way. Kool and the Gang radio is a solid choice on Pandora.

I hear celtic battle and dark musics all the time. It inspires me and calms at same time.

I listen http://www.dancetime.fm/

I have a few stations tuned on iTunes radio just the way I want them:

• Linkin Park
• The Hooters
• Manowar

My favorite radio - http://radioparadise.com If i need to write lot of forms - http://ah.fm

John Mayer normally whilst coding, but some times it depends what mood im in :)

I usually listen for movies and video game soundtracks. They're built specifically to retain the listener attention (specially on games) so it helps me keeping a sharp eye on whatever I'm doing. :)

James Horner, Hans Zimmer, et al are good choices.

I've been jammin' to these tunes today, they sure helped me get through the day sifting through legacy AS3 code:

Edit: I created a Spotify Playlist instead: http://open.spotify.com/user/11126810808/playlist/64PyUfScXKDjdchtlbvG7B

Enjoy! Check out Chet Faker especially, he's a recent gem I found.

I'm not a huge "techno in the headphones while coding" type of guy. Sometimes, I need complete silence to focus; but, otherwise, it'll be quieter music, like Josh Rouse, Glen Hansard, etc.

Usually prefer silence but have my Juggalo music collection for when I want some peaceful mood lifting background music :-)

Usually: City and Colour, Memphis May Fire or even my band sometimes Hundred Miles!!

A lot of discussion on Twitter amongst the UserScape crew a couple weeks ago. Some movie soundtracks mentioned: Tron Legacy, Social Network, Oblivion...

Today, it's the sound of fans inside my server room.

Music soundtracks, The Social Network (definitely gets me in the mood), Ghosts I-IV also by Trent Reznor has a similar vibe and is great too. Anything instrumental that I don't need to 'listen' too.

Yeah - Oblivion was my suggestion in that discussion. I love that soundtrack. In the theater, it felt like I was listening to Mass Effect. Plenty of people hated that movie, but I liked it.

Listening to the Social Network soundtrack right now.

Social Network for the win then. It is a great soundtrack.

Techno, Trance or Dance music... depending on the mood and what i'm working on, and funny enough it depends on the programming language as well, when working with Laravel sometimes i prefer soft / lighter music as i'm still learning a lot and sometimes need the calmness, but like in Java i will be rolling out the rock / metal music for some unknown reason.

@Rudamel Thumbs up for that link!

Silence doesn't work for me. I host a radioshow on a local station (in Antwerp, Belgium). The playlists mostly reflect what I am listening to while coding.

Certain music does help with bottling down and focusing, I'd definitely recommend Above & Beyond for trance/house background music. Doesn't take too much listening.

http://www.aboveandbeyond.nu/radio

Started using Google Music recently, and it's great. I use the "Radiant Player" player for Mac (I built the Yosemite branch of it on my own to have the new styling), but it's also on iOS and Android.

@JeffreyWay, +1 for Oblivion -- I enjoyed the movie and couldn't care less if the critics didn't.

As for music, I use the KLove app.

For soundtracks, I sometimes go for the more modern ones like Social Network (see playlist here: http://open.spotify.com/user/dabernathy89/playlist/1PK3A6SNw9dE345Zdtl0KH).

Other times i'm more in the mood for mellow / traditional soundtracks - I love Thomas Newman especially: http://open.spotify.com/artist/1csBgT42N4pPPs1HJhxXIK

And then other times I go for the more epic / powerful soundtracks. Man of Steel and Gravity are some good recent ones.

When i'm not in a soundtrack mood, I like instrumental post-rock or more mellow instrumental music. I've been listening to a lot of This Will Destroy You; they make a good base for a Spotify radio station. Balmorhea is a good calm band.

I used to listen to anything and everything while I was coding, I now realise I work far better with nothing on. I'm a drummer so when my hands aren't on the keyboard I find myself tapping along to music and this usually ends up breaking my concentration. If their are distracting noises going on around me, I find putting a white noise generator on is a good way of blocking them out (http://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/whiteNoiseGenerator.php).

My concentration is so bad that it had gotten to the point that if I paused to think whilst programming, I would reflexively tab across to chrome and open up facebook/hacker news/reddit. It got so bad that I now use the Self Control app (selfcontrolapp.com) to block these websites for a period of time. I find that doing this in conjunction with using the pomodoro method works well for me.

Thanks for the heads up on some good movie soundtracks.

Also, I really love video game music for coding. Especially the older stuff. However, for video game music I find Chrono Cross is my favourite soundtrack.