If this does indeed work out, all of the Wacked Sounds Collections of the past and future will be of better quality at the same size! Here’s the scoop: The mic on my QuickCam is pretty lousy & my Powerbook is pretty noisy. So improving the quality a bit and recording at 11 mHz wasn’t a big enough justification for nearly doubling the space of the individual sounds. So I have been recording at 7 mHz or even at 11 mHz and resampling (which is often even worse). However, as I tried all kinds of sampling programs trying to find one that would actually remove noise, I tried some weird conversions with SoundApp. and the IMA setting shrunk the sound to roughly half the original size! I couldn’t believe it. So, full of doubt I made sure that it did indeed remain a genuine System 7 sound... It did... and the quality didn’t disappear! (Sorry for all of the exclamation points) It did, however, force a change to 16 Bits. No expert here, so I don’t know it that has any ramifications on other people’s machines. Mine is quite content with the new sound, but who knows about the rest of the Mac community...
So I remade the AppleSOS Joke Sound at 11 Mhz and made it longer and better... and it’s smaller!!! But I need to know if anyone has any problems playing it. Even if you do, of course, Sound App will convert it to a playable format and you had half the download time! So I need beta testers to tell me if I can do this to all of my collections and sounds of the past and future to save folks time & quality. So please try this baby and
1 - Send me Email telling me if it worked okay
2 - What kind of machine you have
3 - What System version you are running.
In exchange for the help, I will personally mail you a cleaned up version of the Windows95 Slam Sound (if you would like me to).
All of my sounds are, of course, Freeware, because... Well, they are sounds for crissakes. However, they are not public domain. Which means that they are copyrighted to me. If anyone, say... just as an example of course... enters a contest and wins stuff claiming they created one of my sounds, it will become a legal issue (okay, yes, someone has). Please read the terms at the bottom.
If you wish to do something in payment to me, then write nasty EMail to anyone who includes Readme documents in slow loading programs (MS Word), or programs most people don't have (MacWrite) despite the fact that EVERYONE has Simpletext and it’s fast or Stand-Alone Docs (DocMaker). Or donate to the NEA. Or stop drinking Snapple. If you do these things, I might come back to America. For those that were around for Volume 1, I have long since left the girlfriend... but all of the advice and concern was very kind.
Well for the hell of it... the old schpeel... I'm Dave, an American expatriate stage & film actor, writer, and teacher in Prague. I have a little Powerbook 150 with nothing but a Printer port, Modem port, and SCSI. No built-in mic, monitor options, or color. But then I bought the wonderful Connectix QuickCam™ and suddenly had "video" and audio input via the printer port. So these sounds might not be the best of audio perfection, but they are meant to be fun - not to admire bouncing between speakers, great clarity and all that crap.
** Anyways, if you liked any of the Wacked Sounds... here is another one. It should be amusing to the whole Mac community such as the “Win95 Slam Sound” and AppleSOS Joke Sound” sounds so I’m shipping it solo although a Wacked Sounds Volume 5 is soon to follow. But I don’t want to ship this in a huge package that people will hesistate to download because of size... Once again, I am always jonesing for EMail. Please do. Let me know... uh, something.
All of my collections can be found or links to them can be found at my new Software Page:
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/8264/software.html
And I’ve just begun taking Wacked Sounds requests on my Wacked Sounds Page:
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/8264/wacked.html
Dave Ulrich
Wacked Wares
dave@terminal.cz
dave@geocities.com
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/8264
Oh yeah.... A Disclaimer.... They're sounds for chrissakes. But if your computer explodes or anything else happens that makes you want to sue me when you are playing these sounds, know that I said here in this document, that you use these sounds at your own risk. I also take no responsibilty for bad taste or offending you.
LEGAL TERMS: Feel free to upload anywhere or include on any CD-ROM as long as they are unaltered, intact, and include this "readme" file. Exceptions will be made only with permission from me, the author. Any distribution without credit to the author may result in legal action. DO NOT USE THESE SOUNDS TO MAKE MONEY OR RECEIVE GIFTS VIA CONTESTS OR WHAT-NOT.
