Subj: Tricks in SOUND.PDM 92-07-12 20:08:56 EDT From: KennethU ______________________________________________________________________ (kudut@hamp.hampshire.edu, 170 East Clay Ave., Roselle Park, NJ 07204) ______________________________________________________________________ Do you love playing with the SOUND.PDM program in Deskmate on your Tandy 1000 RL(X)/SL/TL/XL series computer? I do. Here's some little tips and tricks on using SOUND: 1) Playing your files at "Chipmunk" or "Evil Robotic Man" Speeds. A) Chipmunk - Warp Drives Enabled, Captain. Press F5 and select Sampling Rate. Make it 5500. Record your "Sound Snippit"(tm). Under the Edit F3 menu, hit "Select All" After everything is highlighted, hit F3 and Copy. Now, either save the Sound Snippit as it is (if you want a normal copy of it as well), or just select New from the F2 menu. After selecting New from the F2 menu, hit F3 and Paste. Play your sound -- The Chipmunks are at it again! Explanation: You recorded your sound at 5500 samples per second. This means that the SOUND program takes whatever is coming into the microphone jack and saves it in little "blips". Each Blip equals 1 byte of disk or memory space. So, every second that you are recording something, 5500 distinctive little bytes are saved in a row, making a "picture" of the sound, rather like all the little dots you see in the pictures on a newspaper. Alone, the dots are meaningless. But, when placed together in the correct pattern, they form something recognizable. And, the closer together the dots are, and the more dots that you have, the sharper the image is. Now, why does it play twice as fast? Here's a pseudo-picture of the sound, digitized (bunches of little digits) at the rate of 5500 samples per second: \. . . . . . . . . . . / Each dot represents a sample, a piece, a snatched bit o' sound coming in from the microphone jack. Now, when you play it back at 5500 samples per second, it plays back in this pattern: \. . . . . . . . . . . / However, when you start a new file, the sampling rate is automatically 11,000 samples per second. So, when you paste it down, it looks rather like this: \. . . . . . . . . . . / Same information takes up half the space. So, it would play faster and higher. B) "Evil Robotic Man" Can you tell that the author watched too much Doctor Who as a teenager? Still, the process is the same. What will this do? Well, you'll be able to play sounds at half the frequency - an octave lower - than they were recorded. Record your sound at 22,000 samples per second. Cut or Copy your sound into the Clipboard Select "New" from the File menu (with or without saving, your choice). Select Paste from the Edit menu. Now your sound is playing s l o w l y ! Explanation: Pretty much the same reason as before. A sound recorded like \......./ Would now look like \. . . . . . . / The Sound's playing time drops to 1/2 original speed, while the frequency drops down an octave -- 1/2 of what its original frequency was. 2) Sharing your Sound Files with the world! You have this really awesome sound clip of Arnold S. saying, "I'll be back", recorded in SOUND, but you tried to give it to to a friend that has digitized sound capability (Amiga, Atari ST, Sound Blaster, PS/1, others), and it WOULDN'T WORK! Boy, and your friend wasn't happy with you AT ALL! All your friend got was some nasty hiss... What's the deal? Well, if your friend can play raw digitized sound, but couldn't play your sound, then you probably decided to save space and used the "Data Compression" option under the File menu. Assuming you've used "Data Compression"... Open the file you want to change into raw digitized sound. Select "Data Compression" from the File menu. Hit the button that says "No Compression". Save your file again. (you can use "Save As..." if you want to keep a copy of the sound in the compressed format) Now you should be able to give your file to anyone that has something that plays raw digitized sounds. _________________________________________________________________ / \ / "Now, wait a minute! If SOUND can play raw digitized sounds, then \ \ how come I can only load sounds created with the SOUND program?" / \_________________________________________________________________/ Well, SOUND doesn't -exactly- play raw digitized sounds. At the beginning of each .SND file created by SOUND, there is some information about the sound, including the name of the file that you see listed when you're in SOUND, the instrument number (if it's an instrument file, which can't be played by other digitized sound players all that well), and other information. There's probably more information stored there, but that's what I could gather from looking at it in Norton's DISKEDIT. SOUND needs that information for it to load successfully into the Sound Editor. If it doesn't, you get the infamous "Not Sound Editor File" error. One of my projects as a -very- novice programmer is to write a program that will add the needed info into ANY digitized sound, allowing it to be used in SOUND. If you are a programmer and can do this, then please be my guest! Just send me a copy and the source code, because I'd LOVE to see how you did it! (I'm sure it can't be -too- hard). - - - - - | | - - - - - I hope I've helped you in some way, shape or form. I really do love Deskmate and I will continue on using it and spreading the word on how great it is for many years to come. "Upgrade or Die" isn't one of my expressions, and the last thing I want to do is to get caught up in the "Upgrade, upgrade, upgrade" marketing race. I have a computer that WORKS (a Tandy 1000 TL), and it works WELL at that! A vast majority of IBM compatibles out there are 8086's and 8088's. There are also lots of non-IBM and non-Mac computers out there that have been servicing people well for a long time. We need to not forget these heroes for they didn't give in. They have something that WORKS for them and they'll defend it to the death! I hail people like that, with their CoCo's and CP/M machines, and the other --- oh, the favorite word of the early '90's: "Obsolete" computers like the IBM PC/XT, PCjr, etc. Just because they haven't got the press coverage doesn't mean that they're not out there in droves. May they live long. --Kenneth Udut on July 12, 1992, 8:30pm in Deskmate 3.05 Tandy 1000 TL Internet: kudut@hamp.hampshire.edu K Udut or K Udut2 on most services, like PC-Link/AOL/Promenade/Delphi 170 East Clay Avenue, Roselle Park, NJ 07204-2050 Listowner of Y-RIGHTS@SJUVM Discussion on the Rights of Kids and Teens