Communicating with Sound:
Getting Started


Computers in Communication
Boston University College of Communication
Copyright © 1996 by Professor Jim Lengel

All the tools you need for a quick-and-dirty capture of sound are built in to the Macintosh. If you want to capture sound with more flexibility, use the SoundEdit software from Macromedia. These instructions show you how to capture sound with both methods, and to edit sounds with SoundEdit.

When working with sound in the COM Multimedia Lab, please use headphones. The headphones are located in the cabinet below the printer. Plug the headphones in the back of your computer under the speaker icon. Plug your microphone under the microphone icon.


Quick and Dirty Sound Capture
For a quick capture of live sound, place the Macintosh microphone near the source, and shut off all extraneous noises. Open up the sound control panel. Click on the button called Add. Click on the record button in the control panel, make your sound, and then click Stop. Give your sound a name and save it. It's name will show up in the list of Alert Sounds. Click on it to hear it.

Your sound is saved as a resource in the System File on your hard drive. To see it, double click on the System suitcase icon in the System folder. Double click on your sound to hear it. From here you can drag your sound file to your project folder. (This dragging of items from the System suitcase can only be accomplished when no programs are running on your computer.)


Using SoundEdit to capture sound is much the same, except that its control panel has many more features that allow you to exert more control over your sound. Open SoundEdit, and make sure the Recording Options are set to take sound from the built-in microphone. Check the should level by clicking on the meter icon and making some sound - you will see a moving green bar representing the amplitude of your sound in the SoundEdit window. (Keep the microphone away from the speaker at this point, or you will get audio feedback.)

When you are ready to record, click the red record button. Make the sound. The sound will NOT show up in the window as it is being recorded. When you're done, click the stop button and the recording will stop. Now an image of your sound will show up in the SoundEdit window. You can edit the sound by selecting parts of its image with the mouse. You can cut, copy, and paste your selection, just as you would with words in a word processor. SoundEdit is to sound what a word processor is to words.

You can select a portion of your sound and apply sound effects to it. Just select the part of the sound you want to modify, then choose a treatment from the Effects menu. You can insert another sound into what you have by placing the cursor at the desired spot and recording from there. You may also open a new window in SoundEdit from the File menu, record a new sound there, then copy and paste it into another SoundEdit window.

To blend several sounds together, choose Add Track from the Sound menu. The record or paste a sound into this new track. Make a third, or a fourth track if you need to. Then choose Mix from the Sound menu, and the computer will combine all your tracks into one.

When you have the sound the way you want it, save it to your disk as an Audio IFF file, or as a QuickTime movie. These two formats are the most useful.


Recording from External Sources
To record sound from a tape recorder, connect the audio out jack from the tape recorder to the microphone jack on the Macintosh. (Sometimes this signal is too loud for the Mac to handle, and it sounds garbled. If so, use the little gray mini-to-RCA adapter that came with your Macintosh. This adapter attenuates the sound level.) Then use the Sound Control Panel or SoundEdit in the same way described above to capture the sound.


Capturing Sound from a Compact Disc
Sound on a CD is already in digital form. You can use MoviePlayer 2.0 to convert sounds from a CD directly into sound-only QuickTime movies. Put your music compact disc into the drive on your computer. Launch MoviePlayer 2.0. Use Open from the File menu to open one of the tracks on the CD. Select the track you want to use, then click on the Options button. From this control panel, you will be able to preview the track you want to record, and choose the exact piece of the music you want to capture. You can also set the quality (sampling rate) of the sound from this control panel. The sound will be saved to your disk as a sound-only QuickTime move, from where it can be imported into almost any other program.


MoviePlayer 2.0 can turn any sound file into a sound-only QuickTime movie, which is important especially if you plan later to import it into ClarisWorks or Persuasion. To do this, launch the MoviePlayer program. Use the file menu to open the sound file of your choice. MoviePlayer will ask you to choose a name for your sound-movie. Save this QuickTime movie into your project folder.