Now maybe people will stop stealing the Doom door sound

January 10, 2009 10:04 PM

SFXR by Tomas Pettersson - Ever needed a skilled Foley artist and an audio lab for making sound effects? No, probably not, but even the most amateur game designer needs sound effects for his game. Now, thanks to Tomas Pettersson the long tradition of stealing sound effects from other games is finally over. It doesn't do much more than little 8-bit bleeps and bloops, but it sure feels nice to have original, royalty-free sound effects for your game, or just for fun. [previously]
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia (15 comments total)

The Previously link is something that turned up when I was double-checking and retained for the sake of full disclosure. I actually heard of the program from a friend of mine.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 10:06 PM on January 10

Ever needed a skilled Foley artist and an audio lab for making sound effects?

Actually, yes.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 10:26 PM on January 10

I found the Mac port of this program when looking for a way to synthesize sounds on the iPhone. It's pretty cool and the parameters should be familiar to anyone who worked with sound from the C64's SID chip.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 10:46 PM on January 10

Does it have Wilhelm? I want a game called Wilhelm whose every sound, every musical note, is a Wilhelm.
posted by pracowity at 11:54 PM on January 10

Yes, sfxr is great, isn't it.

Heard of it from a friend of mine? That's just what you think, Mr Encyclopedia. In fact you are nothing but a pawn in my cunning scheme to have other people make FPPs to awesome links of my choosing which I first post surreptitiously myself in a comment somewhere - or, and this is the good bit - not. This is just a start. Buahaha.
posted by motty at 12:29 AM on January 11

Just as long as I don't have to keep the door-opening and the fireball wooshing sounds from Doom everywhere I go.
posted by bardic at 1:46 AM on January 11

I used this program a fair bit a few months ago, and can vouch for it. It's very nice.

(Hm, maybe I should post the sounds I made with it on the web somewhere? I was quite pleased with them.)
posted by JHarris at 2:03 AM on January 11

Oh, and it should be noted that Derek Yu used it to provide the sound effects for Spelunky (recently on the front page).
posted by JHarris at 2:04 AM on January 11

I'm gonna try to use this in a certain upcoming xbox360/ps3 game.

Though, if you're actually hurting for sound effects for your game, the Indiegamer forums are just crawling with talented sound designers who work for peanuts. Audio should never be an afterthought; underestimate its importance to game design at your own peril!
posted by jake at 7:01 AM on January 11

If you're interested in sound effects, I recommend the following:

Most similar to the program in the FPP in style and results:
Stomper

Build two custom waveforms and "morph" them into one another.
Smorphi

Create sounds by connecting up modules that each process the sound in simple ways:
Quack (may have a more recent version, but I haven't been able to contact the authors in years)
Audio Architect

Create sounds by connecting springs and masses together to make a physical model of a vibrating object (usually produces tonal or bell-like sounds, with a very different method from but similar results to a lot of Sega Genesis music)
PhyMod

Create sounds by loading an image and treating it like a spectrogram:
Coagula
Metasynth
Enscribe


Sound editors (to tweak your generated results):
Goldwave: intuitive and capable of editing very long sounds no sweat
Soundprobe: allows you to edit your files in amplitude view and in frequency view
Ace of WAV: badass, extremely complete including scripting capabilities
Audacity completely cross-platform and open source

General sites of interest:
The Sonic Spot (sound synthesis and processing programs of many kinds, mostly old)
Shareware Music Machine (sound synthesis, processing, recording, on a variety of platforms and licenses)
posted by Jpfed at 11:00 AM on January 11 [6 favorites]

I forgot Awave, which converts nearly any audio format to any other audio format.
posted by Jpfed at 11:17 AM on January 11 [2 favorites]

Nice post Mr. Encyclopedia and thanks for the additional links Jpfed - handy stuff!
posted by SmileyChewtrain at 1:05 PM on January 11

This smells faintly of Max/Msp as the development platform.
posted by 5imian at 6:03 PM on January 11

I felt kind of bad about not including more in my post, so thanks, Jpfed, for stepping up to the plate.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 7:01 PM on January 11

Crazy awesome post Jpfed!!!
posted by 5imian at 8:09 PM on January 31