Windows Sound Schemes

I remember the first computer we owned which had a real sound card and speakers
(not the little mono speaker whose whole existence is to produce a few variations
on the "beep" sound). It was a game computer for my son. When we discovered
the availability of the Sound Schemes, we spent a few hours creating a Marvin
sound scheme (the depressed robot from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ...
perhaps you have heard of him). So instead of just shutting down, our computer
now went to stand in the corner and rust until we started it up again, at which
time it told us that all the diodes running down the left side of its leg still
hurt. It was quite fun.

Creating these sound Schemes (by the way, if you are going to search on the
Internet for sounds, search for "Sound Schemes" not "Sound Themes",
and you will find a great deal more listings) is not difficult at all, and can
be a great time consumer (like dry paper is consumed by a roaring blaze).

Microphones for the computer are cheap these days, but spend a few extra Euro's
and get a good one. The USB connected microphones are amazing. I just got one
of these a few months ago and was amazed at the difference in sound quality.
Using the internal microphone of most laptops will probably not be very appealing.
While they will work, room ambient noise tends to make the quality of the samplings
rather poor. External microphones (especially those with some noise canceling
properties to them) work much better for capturing the voices of children and
loved ones if that is your goal. I have the Logitech USB Headset and microphone
combination, which works very well.

Samplings from movies and other sources (radio shows for example) work better
using a more direct method. The cheap/easy way to capture these is to use a
Male-to-Male microphone patch cord (http://www.axentmicro.com/huzrb/partdetails~af~gle~mp~MU6MM.htm).
These can be purchased at just about any electronics store, and on the Internet.
The price is generally under $10. Plugging these from your source's headset/output
port into the microphone/input port of your computer and recording the sounds
directly removes ambient noise, for a much cleaner sound sampling. The cleaner
the sound sampling prior to editing, the better; every time you copy or edit
a sound file, there is some degrading in quality.

Of course the best way to get a sound byte is from the CD directly. If you
have, for example, the radio show Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy on CD, then
you can rip the sound files off the CD and edit them in a sound editor, cutting
out your sound bytes and saving them as WAV files. WAV files are required for
Windows sound schemes. They are much larger than MP3 files, but we aren't going
to play a whole episode or song on computer start-up. You might do this, but
trust me, after a few days of having to listen to the whole song before you
can use the computer will get old fast. What we are after in scheme are bytes
about 3 to 5 seconds in length. Getting the right sounds at the right length
is an art-form.

There are several software packages on the market for the recording and editing
of sound files. The one I personally like is Audacity. Audacity really does
give the big market software packages (such as Sound Forge) a run for the money.
The fact that Audacity is free is good, but the fact that it works is even better.
Audacity can be downloaded off their website (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/).
There are versions for Windows, Linux and the newer Macs. Once you have installed
the software, the interface is easy to understand, and the help files... actually
help. There are several user communities as well for questions you might have
which are not addressed in the help files.

Once we have our samplings in a directory we can find, and named so that we
remember what they were, we can start assigning these to events on our computer,
such as the Error Ding, or the Start-Up sound or the Shut-Down sound. There
is a long list of events we can assign sounds to. To do this on Windows, go
into the Control Panel, and choose the Sounds and Audio Devices icon to open
the sound control applet. Then go to the Sounds Tab (second one on the left).
Once there, you will see a list of events which you can choose sounds for. It
is very easy and the applet lets you review the sounds as you assign them.