This is a 'quick and dirty' program to do drag and drop conversion to and from Windoze .WAV files and Mac sound files.
In the spirit of all great obsessions it has grown a little beyond that, however the basic underlying philosophy remains. That is:
If you open a non-Macintosh file with it, it will convert it to a Macintosh file (more on this later), and
If you open a Macintosh file with it, it will convert it to a Windoze .WAV file.
The output options are fairly limited. 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) ╡-Law (again provided they are 8 bit mono), Amiga 8SVX (completely untested - let me know if it does/doesn't work), 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.
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.
