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Tips on Creating Sound Sets
Since the release of SoundMaster (an old control panel that let you associate sounds with things your computer did), I've been making sounds that go with my machines. Up until OS 8.5, Windows 95/98 seemed to have the best way of doing this (it is still easier to do, but harder to share sound sets on Windows, even today). Below you'll find my notes and tips that I gather as I learn more about how these work (there is almost no technical documentation on how to control some of the subtle elements of sound sets such as slight pitch variations that seem to occur at random on some sounds).
At this time I have not seen anything that works like this on OS X (but I haven't kept up with OS X since it was in beta). I found some mimimal evidence in the directories that came in one of the betas, suggesting there might be support for this, but it seems to have vanished with the GM version.
What You'll Need
| Sound Files (in standard Mac SND files), check out ClixSounds, or EventSounds for some good collections. |
| Sound Set Creator (no supported) or some kind of resource editor like ResEdit or Resourcerer. These two tools are fairly complicated for most people who use their computers to do every-day things. If you really want to geek out, you can use these tools... they really are a blast when you mess around with them, but you can do some serious damage to the system (usually nothing a reinstall of your system won't fix), so be careful if it's your first time using it. |
| Macintosh OS 8.5 or higher |
| OPTIONAL: Sound Editing Software (Check out www.versiontracker.com and pick one out) |
| OPTIONAL: Sound Processing Tool (such as SoundApp) |
Step 1: Get Sounds
There are many ways to get sounds into your computer: download some off the net, steal some from a video game or program that has sounds, generate them with sound software, buy a CD of sounds, record some from an audio CD, television, or your microphone. The most pure sounds will generally come from a CD, which is usually mastered to remove hiss and background noise. Television tends to sound bad if recorded from a mic (just about anything recorded on a mic will have some hiss to it). Even if you link direclty with an RCA jack, television/VCR audio can get an extra buzz when the video signal bleeds into the audio portion. Usually the higher budget productions know how to make this work, but you may notice local TV commercials in your area sometimes buzz due to poor mixing).
All of the sounds I used were copied from sound files (WAV or AIFF), QuickTime clips, or recorded by me. I use stereo sounds for very few events, but they have their time and place. Furthermore, I have experimented with converting all my 16 bit sounds down to 8 bit sounds (using SoundApp) and found that there tends not to be a noticable loss in the quality of the sounds in most cases, while making the sound sets take up less space in RAM and on disk.
I have found that editing sounds down into smaller parts is necessary when making a good sound set. If sounds are too long, they tend to get irritating (at least to some). One shareware program that I've been using is called SoundEffects by Alberto Ricci (recently the program has become commercially available from MicroMat under the name SoundMaker). With this you can cut out extra noise at the beginning and end of a sound as well as giving you a number of different options for changing the sound properties and adding special effects. Another great feature of these programs is that you can use the "Set Loop" option to make your sounds repeat for actions such as dragging a window, or dragging the scrollbar.
Step 2: Combine Your Sounds into a SoundSet
In my first attempts at making sound sets for OS 8.5, I began with ResEdit, but found it to be very slow going. Then I found a program called Sound Set Creator (which I made the icon for) that made the job much easier. While it taught me a lot about the basics of sound sets, I soon found that these early versions of the software had some limitations in what sounds I could make work. There are no other programs out there which make this task easy that I know of. There were a couple nice tools developed over the years, but it seems all my links to them are dead and I suspect that they no longer exist for the general public. The other options for creating sound sets are ResEdit or Resourcerer which are both fairly geeky programs and not for the every-day computer user. If you're willing to spend some time messing around with files and potentially messing up your system, this is an extremely fun toy. Most of the damage I've ever seen it do can be fixed by reinstalling the Mac OS. It is somewhat obsolete if Mac OS X becomes the normal operating system (much like this web page). Unfortunately I am unable to teach people how to use this tool. It really is best when self-discovered.
Technical Notes
One interesting/frustrating thing I found while I was changing the bit depth of my sounds from 16 to 8 was that if your drag sounds are at a different depth than your drag release or resize sound, you may find that one of those sounds will not play (for example, I had 16 bit drag sounds with 8 bit drag release sounds and my release sounds would not play).
Another thing I found when basing my sounds off of other sound sets is that there is a resource called snd# which seems to not only regulate how many times a sound might play (according to Mariel Lohninger and their findings when making the SGI sound set), and this can also dictate if a sound is to be reused for multiple actions or if completely unique sounds should be used for each action. This is illustrated best in comparing the R2D2 SoundSet with the Jedi SoundSet. The idle drag sound in the R2D2 SoundSet also plays for the idle scrollbar sound, while the idle sounds for windows and scrollbars are completely different sounds in the Jedi sound set. The main difference here is the snd# resource which I obtained by ResEditing other sound sets, and the resource numbers I assigned to the sounds (giving them some slightly different numbers to match the ones of the sound set I found the new snd# resource in).
As I learn more I will try and share what info I have with anybody interested. Hopefully Apple will release an official tool (or at least some documentation) for creating sound sets (and Themes for that matter), but until then we all have to piece this together for ourselves.