Making Custom Sounds for Your Webpage
The first task -- and it sounds less important than it is whether you know it or not -- is to think about choosing tje sounds for your website. You want cohesive sound design with the smallest possible file size. In fact, there's a whole spectrum of goals for your sound design, and you should plan accordingly. You could provide ambiance or sound effects to a webpage, or the webpage could even be an interactive game or genre specific groove machine. Not to mention an interactive remix of todays hottest pop stars.
You can find your sounds on the Internet or you can make them from scratch. Look in the Toolbox below for links to some sounds. If you want to produce your own you must have a decent microphone, a mixer, a cord going in and out of the mixer into your computer, some basic recording software, maybe some sound processing goodies, and a quiet enviroment in which to record to keep the noise floor down. Got all that?
Technically speaking, Angry Coffee suggests that you record with the highest sample and bit rates possible in order to get the highest fidelity out of the Beatnik player. Usually 16 bit, 44.1 kHz for common commerical CD sampling rate), or sometimes 24-bit, 48 kHz for upper-end pro audio.
The next step is to convert that sound file into a 16-bit 22.5 kHz file. Later on in this tutorial we'll show you how to use the Beatnik Editor to compress that sound file using other compression encoding choices like lossless Beatnik, Sun ulaw & alaw, and the popular MP3 compression format (variable choices of 32k bit to 320k bit encoding).
Because of bandwidth issues we don't recommend full 16-bit 44.1 kHz CD-quality audio. It would take too long for your sounds to download. So we have to make the required sample-rate conversions using sound editing software. Look in the Toolbox below for audio editing programs both for Macintosh and PC Windows 95/NT.
One very popular Macintosh program for basic editing is BarbaBatch by AudioEase. We could take you through this process using DigiDesigns' Pro Tools, which gives you a good visual representation of the wave form for editing, normalizing, fade in, fade out, and of course sample-rate conversion. But Pro Tools is expensive, while BarbaBatch has a free demo or is $99 to register for full functionality and does everything we just listed for Pro Tools. If you want to use something else that's fine: we made it so that everything in this tutorial will translate to any piece of audio editing software.
