Entries tagged with “sound effects” from O'Reilly Digital Media Blog

A quick overview revealed the size of the task: I would have to produce about 4 hours of music, skit material and ambient sound to properly set the mood. In five days. With no wiggle room.

Sounds like . . . Sennheiser. While updating my business card the other day, I started to think it would be cool to have an audio logo as well as a graphic one. You've certainly heard these "earcons" — the THX Deep Note, the Duracell coppertop clank, the Intel Inside chimes. . . . With just a few notes and...

With close to a thousand forest fires fouling the air, it was time for some indoor creativity. Making a digicam spy movie revealed some cool QuickTime tricks and ridiculous workarounds.

Are you driven to distraction by noise? Software solutions promise to help you concentrate, and maybe even lift your mood, by generating ambient noises that mask what bothers you. I've been using one, with pretty good success.

Man, I wish I hadn't just snapped the mic off my pocket voice recorder. Today I got a hilarious call from a robotic telemarketer. Apparently hoping to add impact, the programmer set its speech synth to use a British accent. The greeting went something like this: Hello David. This is Ian from the university. If there's one thing holding you...

Darwin Chamber, whose "3D" soundscapes I recommended last year (see interview), is back with a new Halloween underscore. I just received his new album 3D Halloween Sound FX (Collectors' Edition) via iTunes gift certificate, which is a cool way to do promotion. (Now if only the e-mail were accompanied by the sound of the mail cart that used to set...

Podcast producer Daniel Steinberg has a unique audio editing technique: he uses a Wacom pen controller in one hand and a Countour Design Shuttle controller in the other. I asked him to write a tutorial on his system, which obviously works well because he cranks out a huge amount of high-quality material. We hope to have it online soon. In...

Soundsnap.com launched yesterday with 30,000 free audio samples. As far as I can make out, the sounds are both free to download and royalty-free, so you can use them in your own commercial music productions. Like the popular Freesound Project, the Soundsnap site has audio and waveform previews, so you can see quickly if you're getting an individual drum hit or an entire groove. Unlike Freesound, Soundsnap has simple licensing terms and a clean layout.

I've been playing with the Cepstral speech synthesizer, which offers a unique twist: You can buy individual voices at bargain rates. The standard voices cost just $29.99, and the special-effect ones, which I find have more creative potential, are just $6.99. The synth runs on Windows, OS X, Linux, and even Solaris, and sounds at least as good as the...

A translator sent me a sound file today, wondering how I would transliterate it to English. The sound is for an upcoming Japanese toy you jab with a tiny sword. Like a pistol in Russian roulette, the toy eventually explodes; this sound is what you hear each time you plunge in the blade: Sword Jab Sound (28KB WAV) In Japanese,...

Looking for some creepy soundscapes for Halloween? Check out the latest release from Darwin Chamber, 3D Halloween Sound FX 2006, which just hit the iTunes Store. Chamber, aka Mark Greenfield, brings an unusual musical sensibility to his environmental soundtracks, thanks to his background in techno music and sound editing for TV and film. Instead of simply pointing a mic...

Although web technology has evolved over the years, for the most part, it has remained silent. Will faster and cheaper bandwidth or the partnerships of Internet giants and entertainment conglomerates bring us an audible web? Do surfers even want sound-enhanced websites? Do You? Let your voice be heard!

The venerable Samplenet site just got 161 cool new loops from Loopmasters, which prompted me to dig up some other treasures.

This is so great: an online database of free, user-submitted, Creative Commons-licensed sounds, with audio and visual previews for all.