Searching For Sounds

Want to use the Tarzan’s yell as your "you've got mail" sound? Or ever wondered what a warbler sounds like? FindSounds can help you find these and hundreds of other sound files on the web.

What is FindSounds?

FindSounds is a specialized search engine, like Google and AltaVista, but for sound effects and musical instrument samples. Unlike some other multimedia search services that help you find songs, radio broadcasts or other types of recorded content on the web, FindSounds is limited to simple sounds and short samples.

All of these sounds are from freely available, non-restricted web pages, and that means you can both listen to and download them to your own computer. You can use them in your own multimedia creations for interesting effects or replace the built in sound events in your Windows. So instead of hearing a “ding” whenever you make an error, you can instead hear a “ police siren”.

How do I use the search engine?

The easiest way to get started finding sounds is to browse the list of sound types and simply click on a link for a sound that interests you. Sound types are grouped by category, such as animals, birds, musical instruments, nature, and so on.

Click on a particular sound type -- say the musical instrument jaw harp -- and you see a standard search result page, with links to the web page where the sound was found.

You also see what the sound looks like in waveform, information about the size of the file, sampling rate, and the duration of the sound. You can also hear the sound by clicking on the speaker icon, provided you have an audio player such as Windows Media Player configured on your computer. If you like the sound, there's also a link that allows you to email it to a friend.

There's also a "sounds like search" icon that will retrieve up to 200 audio files that sound most like the example. The similarity of sounds are computed based on characteristics of the digital audio recordings using sound-matching technology developed by Comparisonics, the company behind FindSounds.

You can also limit your search to particular file formats like AIFF, AU, and WAV formats, which are the most popular formats for sound effects on Macintosh, Unix, and Windows respectively.

Other parameters that can be searched on include files recorded in stereo, mono or both, 8 or 16 bit resolution, four different sample rates (higher rates usually means better quality), and a drop down menu for limiting filesize.

What is the colourful graphic image supposed to represent?

This is the Comparisonics waveform display, which provides valuable visual information about the content of the audio file. Like other waveform displays, it is a graph of amplitude (or loudness) over time. Unlike other waveform displays, the graph is colored to reflect the frequency content of the audio file. Similar sounds are represented by similar colors, and changes in sound can be seen as changes in color. For stereo files, the waveform display represents the left and right channels combined.

What about copyright issues? Are these sounds illegal to download?

The site's copyright policy is states that while all of the sounds it makes available are found on publicly accessible web sites, sounds in these audio files may be copyrighted. FindSounds declines to offer advice on the fair use of these files, though it will remove links to copyrighted sounds at the request of the copyright holder.

Is there any other way of searching for the sounds?

Comparisonics Corporation have also developed the FindSounds Palette, a software program for Windows based computers. It comes in 3 flavours with the FindSounds Pro enabling you to organize and search for over 10,000 sounds. You can search for audio files by name, description, category, genre, source, copyright, format, size, number of channels, resolution, sample rate, duration, key, and tempo as well as doing the sounds- like search. It also contains the ability to edit the sounds as well as change the speed for 25 different speeds.

Where can I find an audio player program?

Here are links to three:

• FindSounds Palette
• Apple QuickTime
• Windows Media Player

How do I tell Windows to play a sound for various events such as startup or new mail notification?

1. Download an audio file, saving it to your hard drive.
2. Click on Start, then Settings, then Control Panel.
3. Double-click on the Sounds icon in the Control Panel. This should display the Sound Properties window.
4. Select a Sound Event in the list, such as "New Mail Notification," and then click on the Browse button.
5. Locate the audio file you saved and click on the OK button.

How do I attach a sound to an e-mail message so that it plays automatically when the recipient opens the message?

This can be done using Microsoft Outlook Express Version 5 or 6.

1. Download an audio file, saving it to your hard drive.
2. Create a new message in Outlook Express.
3. From the Format menu, select Rich Text and then from the Background sub-menu, select Sound. The Background Sound window will appear.
4. Click on the Browse button, locate the audio file you saved, and click on the OK button.
5. In the body of the message, remind the recipient to turn on his speakers.
6. When finished composing the message, send it.

Arthur Hissey
Computer Research & Technology
www.crt.net.au