If you want to rock out without the expense or bulk of a full size drum set, you can hook a set of Guitar Hero drums up to your computer for an electronic jam session. More »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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]
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]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!
