Check out the Smart Music series- I've found this REALLY beneficial when I just want to get to work and shut off the stupid ADD part of my brain.

http://www.amazon.com/Smart-Music-Vol-You-Know/dp/B00003Q5AN/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2/102-8352896-3941704?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1174671225&sr=1-2

Cannot reccomend it highly enough.

/J

If you are on OS X, you could use Audio Hijack to record for a while and then loop it.

Boodler, a programmable soundscape tool, is cross-platform (for Python) and will generate lots of different kinds of output for you.

I have ADD, too, and have found the following to be helpful. Maybe some of them will help you. I avoid "songs" and keep entirely to instrumental music when I'm trying to work.

iSerenity has about 30 sounds including pure white noise and is free to use while you're online. I don't know if you can capture the sound and save it to disk. It's great to use to see which sound actually helps you. I thought I wanted white noise but finally settled on the shower.

http://www.iserenity.com/environments.htm

You might consider Chinese music. While having lunch at a Chinese restaurant I realized that the background music was calming and not intrusive. There's an archive of traditional Chinese music at the Internet Chinese Music Archives site with names like High Mount Flowing Water etc--it relaxes me just to read over the list of titles. You can explore on this site and find more titles on other pages, but this page is great to start with.

http://music.ibiblio.org/pub/multimedia/chinese-music/html/traditional.html

Sometimes you might want to have something with a fast tempo going in the background to keep you focused on work and keep you on track. You can find techno, electronic, and ambient music in different places; explore these for starters. Some of them are free downloads. You might also like classical guitar or lute, and baroque music (instrumental, not the songs). The Travis Castillo site has "minimal" tracks--nice to have going in the background, and not intrusive, but it helps block out other things.

http://www.traviscastillo.com/ http://magnatune.com/genres/electronica/ http://magnatune.com/genres/classical/

As the parent of a college student, I've learned that there's software that lets you capture streaming audio, but don't know what it's called.

HTH,
Glenda

For order and structure, you would be better off with music from the Classical period (not to be confused with the generic "classical" music by which people generally mean "cultivated" music as opposed to "vulgar" or "vernacular" music) such as Mozart, Haydn and early Beethoven to name some big names. If you are drawn toward the Baroque period, CPE Bach is a good bridge between the Baroque and Classical periods. The most effective are going to be the pieces or movements with the most structure so look for rondos and first and last movements of sonatas, particularly solo piano sonatas. (The first and last movements are usually the most structured, being either in sonata-allegro or five- or seven-part rondo form.) If you like chamber music, piano trios and string quartets and quintets can be nice too. I would steer clear of concerti as the change in instrumentation from orchestra to solo play is distracting to me.

If you are interested in less tonal music, dodecaphonic/12-tone pieces and pieces such as Bartok's Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celeste offer some of the most rigidly imposed structure for music. It isn't tonal in the traditional sense of the word, so it could be rough on the ears. It might help to read an analysis if you are in any way familiar with music theory.

Since the key is the actual musical form of the piece or movement, it can be difficult to track down the best stuff but you should be able to compile a good list of tracks over the next several weeks.

Audio Hijack can do this or iFill from Griffin can do it as well.

I recently downloaded the free tracks from http://www.fm3buddhamachine.com/. Put them into your player, and enable the tracks for gapless playback. Pick one, set it to repeat, and enjoy! You could also buy the real thing for $25.
I also created a station on Pandora for Brian Eno. It has quickly become my favorite background noise.

Another interesting, more avant-garde possibility is Steve Reich's Drumming.

I downloaded the Buddha machine tracks and they are great. And I'm going to explore the other suggestions.

If you're trying to work, the relaxing tracks might put you to sleep. Techno, electronica, drum, house, & Goa tracks might be better. It would be interesting to know if this is true for others.

You can download tracks from the following site, but might want to edit out the beginning of the tracks where the guy's intro is--the tracks are at various speeds for pacing exercise and running; the ones I've listened to are really good for work--the fast beat tends to keep me on focus.

http://www.djsteveboy.com/podrunner.html

The sound or white noise files can be annoying if they're repetitive -- sometimes I listen to them for a while and can detect repeated insect noises that come right before or after a certain thunder sound, etc. Or the volume changes, or the quality of the sound changes, in some pattern. Then my mind starts listening for the repetitions and I get distracted and the attention my mind is paying to the sounds takes my concentration totally off work. So that's one thing you might watch for if you want sound to work to. I haven't noticed that in the iSerenity tracks, but maybe it's there in some I haven't listened to.

And I second Brian Eno--his ambient music is great for this.

Berko, you are so knowledgeable and analytical about music. Are you a musician? I've seen your posts before here but didn't notice the interest in music.

This is a bit off-thread, but related -- I spent some time last year trying to get my mind "programmed" to concentrate on work and not get distracted when I played a certain kind of music, and had other environmental things under control, like colors I like, scented candles or airwick-type things, etc. I didn't get it to really work as well as I wanted, but never got it to work. With the ADD I wanted more control over my mind and to work more steadily instead of getting distracted, and I hoped the music would help to turn a switch. Has anyone else tried this? What seemed to work best?

--Glenda

I wasn't able to complete my music degree, but yeah, I have a lot of experience with music and my wife has a Master's of Music. I play guitar, bass, and low brass (tuba, euphonium, trombone) and dabble with keyboards and drums. The wife plays flute. So, yeah, I guess you could say we are musical. Thanks for asking!

I think this works best with a genre of music that you like but don't necessarily listen to much. Say, for instance, you like big band/swing stuff, but you don't listen to it very often. You could turn that into your study music. You only listen to it when you study and you don't listen to anything else when you study. I recommended this on another thread concerning "how to get momentum." Hope this helps.

I got my machine on Friday :)