digital audio

Mix A Custom Sleep Track At Sound Sleeping

8:00AM Jason Fitzpatrick | If you’re looking for soothing tracks to help your sleep or fill your work space, Sound Sleeping offers you the ability to mix your own custom track. More »

Play Your IPod Through Your Windows 7 PC’s Speakers

2:00AM The How-To Geek | Windows expert Ed Bott finds a useful feature in Windows 7: you can play an external audio device through your computer’s speakers without any extra software using a simple configuration setting. More »

MP3Extractor Flags And Separates Large MP3 Files

5:00AM Jason Fitzpatrick | Windows only: Lengthy MP3s, like a poorly converted audiobook or an analogue to digital recording, often need to be chopped into smaller, easily managed MP3s. MP3Extractor will make short work of it. More »

MP3 Quality Modifier Packs More Music On MP3 Players

1:30AM Jason Fitzpatrick | Windows only: MP3 Quality Modifier makes it easy to lower the bit rate of your audio files, allowing non-audiophiles to more of them onto an MP3 player. More »

ListenToYouTube Rips Audio From YouTube Vidoes To MP3

3:00AM Jason Fitzpatrick | You find a great video on YouTube and you’d love to save the audio or load it on your MP3 player to listen to later. What can you do? You can hop over to ListenToYouTube. More »

Create Crazy Sound Effects With Household Objects

6:00AM Jason Fitzpatrick | If you’ve ever wanted to play at being a Foley artist for your own audio recordings, sound designer David Filskov posts an interesting list of tricks he’s collected from other designers for turning common objects into audio trickery. It seems like a stretch, until you realise that movie soundtracks are rarely recorded from the source—often because doing so would be dangerous, impractical, or wouldn’t sound believable. The sound of people walking on snow? It’s made by recording people in the studio walking on flour or cornstarch. If you live in a cold, snowy climate, you know how rare that perfectly crunchy and squeaky snow is. The sound of a naval depth charge? A toilet flushing at half speed, with a reverberation filter applied. Alien sounds? Certain kinds of canned dog food make useful sounds as the food comes out of the can. The chunky stuff isn’t so good, but the tightly packed all-one-mass kind makes gushy sucking sounds when the air on the outside of the can is sucked into the can to replace the exiting glob of dog food. This sound can be used as an element in certain kinds of monster vocalizations, alien pod embryo expulsions, etc. Those without pooches can also try solid cranberry sauce for a similarly weird noise. If you have your own tricks for turning every day objects into cool sound effects, share the cinematic magic in the comments below. Extra points will be awarded if you link to your audio of a Chimera fighting a Liger, made with Saran Wrap, a Twinkie, and a startled house cat. Photo by M. Keefe. Epic Sound: The Guide to Sound Effects [via Make] More »

Soundsnap Offers Free Downloadable Sound Effects

10:30AM Lifehacker US Edition | Spice up your videos, games, applications or just make system alerts a little more hilarious by downloading sound effects from Soundsnap. Whether you’re an electronic musician using Ableton Live or a budding YouTube auteur looking to flesh out the audio on a Final Cut Pro project, libraries of free sound effects, loops and samples are like mana (I’m a longtime fan of The Freesound Project). All the sound effects at Soundsnap are uploaded by creators, so if you’ve already done some foley work or futzed around with a Moog to produce sci-fi ambience, help out others by contributing. There are already many thousands of audio clips already available. If you’re a multimedia maker, what sound effects sources do you use? Soundsnap [via Echoplex Park] More »

iTunes 8 Makes It Easy To Convert Any File To An Audiobook

7:00AM Adam Pash | iTunes 8 has added simple under-the-radar feature that allows you to quickly and easily tag any file in your iTunes library as an audiobook and move it into the Audiobooks section of iTunes and your iPod. The simple trick? Just right-click a track and select Get Info, head to the Options tab, and then select Audiobook from the Media Kind drop-down menu. The file will instantly leave your Music library and head straight for your Audiobook library. To mark multiple files at once, just select them all and go through the same process. The only remaining step is to tick the Remember Position checkbox if you haven’t already, and your tracks should now have easily found their way to your Audiobooks section, and even better, they should work like an audiobook. Finally. Thanks Brett! More »

Five Best Media Converters

2:00AM Adam Pash | We’ve all been there: you’ve downloaded an episode of your favourite TV show to watch on your commute or stream to your living room, but the file you downloaded isn’t supported on the device you want to use it with. Once a significant obstacle to enjoying your media anywhere, this problem is easily solved by any number of free media converters. Keep reading for a closer look at the most powerful and easiest to use media converters. More »

MediaJoin Combines Several Media Files into One

6:00AM Adam Pash | Windows only: Free application MediaJoin—as its name suggests—combines several media files into one long file. Say, for example, you wanted to a three-part video or a live album into one long playable file. Just fire up MediaJoin, select the files you want to combine, and let the application do its work. MediaJoin can even string together files of different types, but be aware: doing so means transcoding files, which means you’ll see some loss in quality. I converted a live album of MP3s, though, and it ran through the files so quickly I don’t see how it could have been transcoding. (Sticking with the same filetype and bit rate would probably make a difference.) If you’ve ever wanted a simple tool to combine any piece of media with another, the freeware MediaJoin looks like a winner. MedaiJoin [via Download Squad] More »