This is a 'quick and dirty' program to do drag and drop conversion to and from Windoze sound files and Mac sound files.
Although the functionality of the program has been extended from the original design, overall it still basically does the same thing, that is to convert sounds between Mac and Windoze formats.
If you open a non-Macintosh file with it, it will convert it to a Macintosh file, and
If you open a Macintosh file with it, it will convert it to a Windoze file.
The output options are fairly limited (more on this later).
For input however, a Macintosh file is: a system 7 sound file, an FSSD file (with or without HCOM compression), or (if you only want the first sound found) a system file or sound mover suitcase (the latter two are only there because they were easy to do - in future I will probably tart up the interface and let you pick sounds :-).
Non-Macintosh input files can be .WAV files (provided they are 8 bit mono), Sound blaster .VOC files, Sun(/NeXT) µ-Law (again provided they are 8 bit mono), Amiga 8SVX (this seems to work properly now), and AIFF files (I know these are an Apple standard but I figured that 1: I'd be more likely to get one from a Silicon Graphics Machine, and 2: its only a two step process (open it twice) to make a system sound file anyway using an intermediate Windoze file).
Macintosh sound files are a bit varied with system 6. The system 7 format is as much use as tits on a bull to a system 6 user so in a great act of benevolence (i.e. my big brother asked for it) I decided to do something nice for system 6 users. I figured that in the spirit of things I should produce either FSSD files for use by sound master, or sound mover suitcases. Since I abuse things a bit by just using whatever sample rate is input, the fixed rates of FSSD isn't much use (e.g. it couldn't handle 8000 samples per second, which Suns love so I would have to do some resampling and that seems just to much like hard work). A single sound, sound mover suitcase however is identical to a system 7 sound with the creator/type changed. Needless to say I took the easy way out. The sound mover package was on the usual archives last time I looked and is a font/DA mover work-alike for sounds.
Brian's Sound tool doesn't do anything as crass as look at file name extensions to work out what sort of file its dealing with, instead it looks at the creator/type to work out a few basic types (resource types, FSSD files) and then looks inside to work the rest of them out.
The program handles the core Apple Events (almost - print is a non-event!) which means you can work it nicely off the end of Fetch using an automatic post processing mapping for .WAV, .VOC, and .au. If you really want to get carried away, set the creator to 'BSnd' and the type to 'bin ' (Apple file exchange produces 'bin ' files if you use the default transfer mode so I thought I'd be consistant with that) to get some not entirely ugly ICONs.
New bits
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This version (1.2) adds a few things that people asked for and/or I felt like doing. The most noticable thing is that it now has a preferences dialog to let you set up some prefered processing options and have them remembered. By default it should behave exactly the same as it did in the previous version (with a few less bugs). Things that you can now decide are: If you want the standard file dialog to ask you about where the output file should go and be called, or alternatively if you want them to always go to a set folder (system 7 only - just call this lazyness), or to copy the folder name from input. You can decide if you want to play the sound automatically (not a huge feature but it livens things up when you're converting a lot of files with no prompting), and if you want to delete the input file when the output has been successfully written (this is purposefully limited to Apple Event triggered conversions where you want things to all happen automagically so it is system 7 only). You can also select the output file formats to use for both Mac and Windoze files (which means I had to write another output format handler for Windoze so there'd be a choice!).
New for version 1.2, I thought I'd get a fraction more serious with alerts and include the file name when I could (as well as an error number - sorry thats very ugly) to assist when processing a large number of files.
I also added a 'busy' cursor for people with big sounds or slow disks (or both - like me).
Bugs fixed
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A couple of teensy problems with 8SVX (messed up the speed beyond recognition) and AIFF (#ifdef'ed out the whole thing so the code was missing, as well as having a handful of bugs in it - gotcha a double beaudy :-)
Still to come
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Somewhere between nothing, to adding (in no particular order):
Stereo
16 bit
No file name mangling option
Automatic file replace option using nice system 7 features
Mac to Mac (turn all your old FSSD files into System 7 sounds)
Better handling of output file name conflicts
A scroll bar in the about box (since its getting to big)
Unlikely to ever happen
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I don't intend making the program into a convert any format to any other format with resampling and other effects thrown in. There's a perfectly good program in the Un*x and DOS world called SOX which does that quite nicely (its a bit weak on the Mac side of things - only likes HCOM compress FSSD files in Mac Binary format - but then that could be fixed easily enough). Rather I have directed my attention to making a Macintosh style program that understands things like resource forks, standard file dialogs, Apple events, and so forth. If you could put up with a REALLY grotty interface, you could probably compile SOX with Think C and its console stuff to produce a clumsy but very versatile program.
If it doesn't like your sounds
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There are a few sounds that the program can't handle, including normal Mac sound files. The main problem is stereo or more than 8 bit sounds. The polite thing to say is that something might happen about that after the ski season is finished (October). No promises but an interesting challenge. The other problem is sounds that aren't straight sampled sounds but synthesizer commands and strange combinations of the two. These sorts of sounds are fairly rare (someone, somewhere must go to a lot of effort to build them in the first place) and the huge range of possible combinations that would need to be catered for don't seem to me to be worth it.
The bit at the bottom everyone ignores
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The most important thing about 'Brian's Sound Tool' is:
DON'T SEND ANY MONEY FOR IT
I've been grabbing usefull things off the net for years so lets call this my first installment in returning the favour.
If you want to, and you live in some wild far away exotic place ( > 20k from Boronia!), feel free to send me a postcard saying that the program is rubbish (or otherwise). If you're a real optimist, you can send me some e-mail telling me what you think I should fix or add to the next version - remember though, I have a real job so you only get what you paid for.
If you have already asked me if you can put the previous version of the program on 'shareware' disks or CDs and I said yes, then that extends to this version. If I didn't say yes then it means my reply is lost in the post but I meant to say yes :-). In fact anyone that asks is likely to be told yes, however I would appreciate being asked. The only thing I will say no to is charging money for the program (you can charge for the media) or removing my name from the 'about' dialog.
