The Sound of Music

Somewhere along the way it struck me that a silent horseracing simulation wouldn’t be terribly, uh, immersive.

I knew nothing about sound files. So I read a few books.

Do you see a sorta common theme here? I read a lot of books. We all have our own means of learning. I’m very visual, I’m an introvert, and I have this innate sense that I can figure it out – with no one’s help. These are not good traits, by the way. I think I could get things done TWICE as quickly if I were a networker and had a smaller ego. But that’s not natural to me. So I take the hard road sometimes.

I strongly encourage you to get involved in local (or net) user groups and so forth. But rest assured that, God forbid, you’re like me – there is still hope. But you have to read a LOT of books. I finally bought two 6’ bookcases to hold my reference books (which go out of style very quickly).

I also don’t like to spend a lot of money, so I always look for decent shareware tools before I go buy the more expensive, feature-rich tools. I found a reasonably priced audio tool called Cool Edit 2000. It was about $70 as I recall, and MORE than covered my needs. That little company has since been bought out by Adobe and is sold under the name Adobe Audition. More expensive, and more features.

Recently Adobe released a tool in beta called Soundbooth that is a brand new application built in the spirit of Cool Edit. It provides the tools that video editors, designers, and others who do not specialize in audio can use. You can download Soundbooth here.

Anyhoo, with Cool Edit 2000, a $60 Radio Shack microphone and a little $15 mic stand, I created a vast number of sound files for my simulation. Certainly not award-winning stuff, but not bad either.

I had created a “you are there” experience.