White noise and lullabies through the monitor

The five minutes after a nap starts are the ones that decide whether it lasts. Going back into the room to restart a white-noise machine is a good way to end it early.

That is the problem this feature exists for. The phone acting as your camera already has a speaker in it, and it is already in the room.

How it works: MonitorUltra can play white noise, rain or a lullaby out of the baby unit's speaker, started from the parent unit without going near the door. Volume is a slider on your own device, and a timer stops playback after 15, 30 or 60 minutes with a short fade instead of an abrupt cut. Playback loops until the timer ends or you stop it.

What plays, and out of which speaker

There are three sounds. White noise, rain and a lullaby. That is the whole list, and I would rather write the number down than let you infer a library that does not exist. You cannot load your own audio.

All three come out of the baby unit's loudspeaker, which means the sound quality is whatever that particular phone can produce. An old iPhone in a corner of the room does a respectable job of broadband hiss and a fairly thin job of a melody. If white noise is a central part of how your child sleeps, a dedicated machine will still sound better. What the app gives you is the ability to settle a stirring baby without opening the door.

The sound plays whether or not the baby unit's screen is on, and it keeps playing while the app is in the background on that device.

Starting it from the parent unit

The controls sit in the dashboard on the parent unit, under Soothing Sounds. Tap a sound and it starts in the nursery within a second or so. Tap it again to stop.

The command travels over the same live connection the video is using, so it works over Wi-Fi and over cellular, and it works from another floor of the house or from outside it. The button on your screen reflects what the baby unit is really doing, because the baby unit reports its playback state back rather than the parent device guessing. If your partner started the rain from their phone, your phone shows the rain playing.

The baby unit also shows what is playing on its own screen, which is useful when you are standing in the room wondering where the noise is coming from.

Volume and the timer

Volume is a continuous slider on the parent unit, and it appears only while something is playing. Changes take effect as you drag, so you can bring it down gently from the landing and hear the result on the stream.

The timer has three presets: 15, 30 and 60 minutes. Tapping the active one cancels it. When the timer expires, the sound fades out over a few seconds rather than stopping dead, because a sudden silence is itself a thing that wakes people.

Standard advice on sound machines is to keep them at a distance from the cot and to run them at a moderate volume. That applies here exactly as it does to a dedicated machine, and the placement half of it is decided by where you put the camera. There is more on that in the nursery placement guide.

The catch: the microphone is on the same device

The baby unit is playing the sound and listening for crying at the same time, with a microphone a few centimetres from the speaker. The louder the playback, the more of it the microphone hears, and the harder it is for the cry classifier to pick a grizzle out of the background. MonitorUltra classifies audio on the device using Apple's SoundAnalysis framework, and like any detector it can only work with what the microphone actually receives.

Three practical consequences:

Use the timer. This is the strongest reason for it. Fifteen or thirty minutes gets your child over the transition, then playback stops and detection goes back to working in a quiet room for the rest of the nap.

Keep the volume moderate. Enough to cover the noise from the hallway, and no more than that.

Do not rely on cry alerts during playback. If you have started a sound because your child is already unsettled, that is a moment to watch the screen for a minute rather than to put the phone down and trust the notification.

If you already have a white-noise machine

Plenty of families do, and the machine will be better than the phone speaker. The thing to get right is geometry.

Put the camera on the far side of the cot from the speaker, not next to it. A camera parked beside a sound machine is listening to the machine at close range and to your child across the room, which is the wrong way round. Two to three metres from the cot, with the noise source behind or beside the cot rather than behind the camera, keeps cry detection usable.

The same logic applies to air purifiers, radiators that tick, and any fan. If you are running a fan, it is also worth reading the case for turning motion detection off, because moving blades will trip a camera-based alert every few minutes.

What this does not do

There is no two-way talk. You cannot speak into the room from the parent unit. The remote sounds are the closest thing the app has to that, and I would rather say so plainly than let the words "audio" and "remote" imply a feature that is not there.

There is no recording, of the sounds or of anything else. Nothing about a playback session is stored on a server.

It is also a phone speaker at the far end. If you want a monitor that doubles as a proper nursery sound system, buy the sound system separately.

Subscription access

New installations of MonitorUltra require an active subscription to start monitoring, including audio. Any introductory trial depends on the selected App Store offer and eligibility. Existing installations with legacy audio access retain that access; it is not an offer for new users.

Web plans cost $7.99/month or $49.99/year, with a 30-day money-back guarantee. You can cancel renewal at any time. App Store prices and trial terms are shown before you subscribe.

Web pricing is $7.99 a month or $49.99 a year, with a 30-day money-back guarantee, and you can cancel at any time.

Frequently asked questions

Which sounds are included? White noise, rain and a lullaby. Three, with no option to add your own.

Can I start a sound while I am out of the house? Yes. The command uses the same connection as the video stream, which works over cellular as well as Wi-Fi, so distance is not a factor as long as both devices have a signal.

Does the sound keep playing if I close the app on my phone? Yes. Playback runs on the baby unit and continues until the timer ends or somebody stops it. Closing the parent app does not stop it.

Does playing a sound stop the video or the alerts? The video stream carries on as normal. Cry detection also carries on, but it is working against the sound coming from the same device, so treat it as less sensitive while playback is running.

Can both parents control it? Yes. Any paired parent device can start, stop, or change what is playing, and all of them see the current state. Family sharing is covered here.