Go to Home. Pick whatever matches how you want to feel — for focus, for relaxation, or one of the session arcs. Press the tile. Press Start. That's genuinely the entire app if you want it to be — everything past this point is optional depth for when you want more control, not a prerequisite for using it well.

VibroFlō is built around two engines, called Low and High. Both work the same way underneath — each ear hears a slightly different pitch, and your brain perceives the small difference between them as a third, slower pulse that isn't actually present in either tone on its own (a "binaural beat"). The Low engine sits in a felt-more-than-heard range, closer to what a vibroacoustic table uses. The High engine sits in the range most people mean when they say "binaural beats." Neither is "better" — they're different textures of the same underlying idea, and Combine mode runs both at once.

That pulse rate is described using five bands, borrowed from how brainwave activity is commonly grouped: Delta (deep rest), Theta (relaxed), Alpha (calm focus), Beta (alertness), and Gamma (high engagement). Picking a band is picking a target state, not a guarantee — it's a steady external rhythm offered as an invitation, not a switch.

Session Arc is for when you have a clear before-and-after in mind — winding down from alert focus into calm, for example — rather than sitting in one target state the whole time. It glides between two bands over the course of the session instead of holding one the entire way through.

Variability Drift adds a slow, natural wander to the tone. A perfectly steady pulse can start to feel oddly noticeable or fatiguing over a long session, the same way a perfectly silent room can feel louder than one with soft background sound. Drift keeps it from ever settling into something rigid.

EMDR Bilateral Pan is an alternating left-right sound, inspired by (not a replacement for) a real talk-therapy technique some people use to help process difficult or anxious thoughts. It's entirely optional and does nothing unless you turn it on — most sessions won't want it.

Masking Bed softens the tone specifically for shared or open spaces, using a filter that keeps the low end intact while taking the edge off anything that might otherwise carry across a room.

Ambient Layer is real recorded audio — your own library, managed in Settings — that plays underneath everything else. You can queue specific tracks in order, or let it loop through your whole library on its own.

Session Length and ending style decide how the session finishes: a gentle fade to silence, or a slow fade-up in brightness and volume if you're using a session to wake up rather than wind down.

Check-in is a quick mood tap before and after each session. On its own it's a small thing; over time it builds an honest, simple picture of what's actually helping, rather than relying on memory.

This is the newest and most involved part of the app, so it gets the most space here.

Some light-and-sound machines — the MindPlace Kasina is the one this was built and tested against — read a control signal hidden in specific tones, well above normal hearing range, to flash LEDs in time with audio. Three different formats do this, and VibroFlō supports all three because real content in the wild actually uses all three: AudioStrobe (one tone, brightness only), SpectraStrobe (four tones, independent red/green/blue color), and Lumasonic (a newer, similar four-tone color scheme with its own frequencies). You don't need to know which is which to use this — VibroFlō figures it out.

There are two genuinely different ways to use Luminous, and it's worth being clear on which one you're in:

Luminous Sync, on the Session page, generates a signal live, synced to whichever engine is running, for compatible external hardware like a Kasina. Screen Mode instead uses your phone's own screen — no external hardware at all. Screen Mode can also work the other way: if a track you're playing already has a real signal embedded in it, Screen Mode can decode that instead of generating its own, showing you exactly what's actually encoded.

For decoding, a track can either be auto-detected, or manually tagged with a specific format in Settings. Auto-detect builds confidence over a brief window before committing to a format, specifically so a few noisy or borderline moments can't flip the result back and forth. A manual tag skips that entirely and locks immediately — the stronger guarantee, for tracks where you already know the answer. Get a manual tag wrong, though, and it stays silent rather than guessing — which is exactly why tags are editable any time in Settings, not just set once at add-time.

Why the safety warnings exist: flashing light between roughly 10 and 25Hz — squarely where normal brainwave-entrainment rates live — is the range most associated with triggering seizures in people with photosensitive epilepsy. That's not a hypothetical caveat, it's a real, documented risk, which is why Luminous asks for confirmation every single time it's turned on, not just once, and why Screen Mode specifically carries a stronger warning — a screen held against closed eyes is a closer, brighter light source than any external hardware this app supports.

The Test Your Hardware tab is a deliberate lab bench, separate from a real session — a way to confirm your specific device and cables actually reproduce a signal correctly, including isolating individual color channels, before relying on it live.

Files you add here become available to the Ambient Layer on Session and to Luminous's decoder. The light-signal tag on each file matters more than it might seem — it's what tells Screen Mode whether to attempt decoding at all, and which format to expect if so. Getting it right (or fixing it later, which is always available) is the difference between Luminous working cleanly and it staying dark waiting for a signal that isn't where it expects.

Backup exports your presets, session history, Luminous preferences, and format-tag edits as one file you can move to another device or keep as a backup — deliberately not including the actual audio you've uploaded locally, since that can be too large to make a portable file practical.

For the deeper "why does any of this work" theory — what a binaural beat actually is, vibroacoustic therapy, the research behind it — that lives on the About page, kept separate from this practical guide on purpose.