Sound Advice

Tune into an earful of no-cost audio apps.

From Samba's snivelling in Sholay, to the screeching tires in Speed, to the squeals in Sapne Sajan Ke, to six shooters sniping in Stagecoach, to the seetees in Satte pe Satta, to the swish of Spiderman’s sartorials... it’s all synthetic. Manufactured sound. In fact, almost everything that we hear in the movies, other than the vocals is a synthetic, deliberated dissonance. Sound effects that are conceptions of the fascinating science of sound engineering. While sound engineering is too vast and labyrinthine a subject to speak about here, we can tune into some superb free audio apps to size-up the scene.

Audiograbber
Ripping is all about converting audio (usually CDs) from their native formats to MP3, AAC or other compressed audio formats. And Audiograbber is one heck of a powerful audio ripping tool. Apart from CDs, it does external sources likes those ancient LP turntables as well as radios and cassettes. The mammoth feature list includes music normalizing, encoding of external files, track-name downloading and uploading from and to FreeDB, and ID3 tags and CD Text support.

It let’s you conjure WAV, MP3, WMA, or OGG files. A line-in-sampling function can automatically split recordings from LPs into separate tracks and deploy noise reduction. Copy-protected CDs? It takes a crack at them. And rips karaoke (CDG) discs too. Nai murgies, the interface is a little daunting but poke around in help for solace. Audiograbber doesn’t install any DLLs, OCXs, device drivers, spyware, or adware. No entry in the registry or win.ini either. Interesting na…
OS: Windows XP, 2000, NT, Me, 98, 95
Size: 1.59MB
www.audiograbber.com-us.net

Audacity
Here’s a solid one for recording and editing sound. This multiplatform, open-source clone of Macromedia SoundEdit16, records and edits 32-bit files and imports/exports to WAV, AIFF, MP3, and OGG. You can record at 96 KHz from a live microphone, line input, or other sources--and up to 16 channels at once.

Editing of Ogg Vorbis, MP3, and WAV sound files is via cut-copy-paste, dubbing, mixing, or effect additions. A built-in amplitude-envelope editor, customizable spectrogram mode, and a frequency-analysis window for audio-analysis applications are included. Built-in effects comprise bass boost, wahwah, reverb, delay, echo, phaser, reverse, noise reduction, speed and pitch changes. And VST plug-in effects are supported. Now that’s enough ammo to keep the amateur audio aficionado addicted for hours.
OS: Windows XP, 2000, NT, 98
Size: 2.31MB
http://audacity.sourceforge.net

iTunes (Windows)
Time-time ki baat hai. The media junkie world was once ruled by something called WinAmp (yeah, it’s still croaking). But the foremost digital jukebox proggie now is iTunes. This tool boasts of a very polished interface, smart playlists, the ability to rip files in multiple formats (except WMA), network and library sharing, MP3 and AAC-encoding from audio CDs, CD burning, label printing, free downloads, video playback and of course seamless iPod integration.

Jaeb garam ho to the cross-platform player will let you buy music online from over 10,00,000 songs! But if you’re a bhookha-nanga freebie monger like me, you can always settle for the 250 odd free Internet radio stations to listen to. Ah, almost forgot: Integrated podcasts and parental controls bhi hain. Go fetch now.
OS: Windows XP, 2000
Size: 33.8MB
www.apple.com

Streamripper
For those who waddle the Winamp walk, here’s an add-on that gives you the ability to record streaming MP3 files to your hard disk. You can even capture tracks off Internet radio stations for future playback with this Open Source (GPL) application. It saves Shoutcast/Icecast streaming-MP3 audio in its native format while retaining the original track tags. So it actually allows you to download an entire station of music off the Internet!

In case you are wondering why you’d want to rip an Internet radio station, mull this: Several MP3 radio stations are to particular genres. So with Streamripper you can easily download collections of your preferred flavour of music--jazz, trance, rock or whatever brand of harmonics you covet.
OS: Windows XP, 2000, Me, 98, 95
Size: 916.26K
http://streamripper.sourceforge.net