I wrote this hack for our upcoming Halloween party. This will be in the "confusion" room. A microphone will pick up sounds that guests make, and at random intervals, they will hear their own voices played at other parts of the room.
The hack listens to the sound input device and remembers everything it hears (that is loud enough) and then plays those things back in a random order. If your Mac has stereo capability, then it also randomly chooses a speaker to play each sound.
The program creates as many buffers as it can fit in its memory partition. You can see how many buffers were created by choosing "About Confusion…" from the Apple menu. If you want the program to make more buffers, just increase the memory partition for the program with "Get Info…" from the finder.
It first fills each buffer in order until they are all filled with sounds. Then it randomly picks buffers to fill by overwriting old ones.
It randomly chooses a buffer to play back from the ones that are already filled.
••• There are two settings which you can change with ResEdit •••
In the STR# resource, the id 129 contains two strings.
The first one (default 80 I think) is the threshold for sounds being "loud enough". This number must be between 0 and 255. If you want a low threshold (records just about any ambiant sound), then give it a low number. If you only want the loudest sounds to be recorded, then make the number higher.
The program only records sounds above the threshold. In a single buffer, if the sound level goes up and down, only the sections that are above the threshold are remembered and the extra space it trimmed out. So if you tap the mic slowly within a single buffer record, then the playback will sound like you tapped the mic faster. Some extra quiet space is remembered around the loud sections so that there is some continuity.
The second string in STR# 129 is the buffer size (default 65536). The default buffer size records a few seconds in each buffer. If you make this buffer size much bigger, then you should make the memory partition for the program larger. You should always have enough memory to record at least two buffers. If you only have space for one, then it will always be recording to it and never playing it.
••• Freeware notice •••
This software is freeware. If you like it, send me some email saying "cool hack". If you don't like it, then use the source code to make it better.
This program is guaranteed bug free. If you find any bugs or incompatibilities, then should ignore them or send me email about them.
