Noise, Sweet Noise

Now that you know how to play sound effects, you have to somehow come up with sound effects to play. There are two basic approaches that most game programmers use to obtain sound effects. They either find royalty-free effects available commercially or they generate their own.

Finding Sound Effects

The easiest way to find sound effects is to search the Web. Many sites offer MP3 files containing sound effects; however, a lot of them are copied illegally. Enthusiastic fans often copy sounds from movies, TV shows, cartoons, and similar sources. It may be tempting to use these sounds because they're offered for free. Don't give in to that temptation! Those are copyrighted sounds. If your game becomes popular, it can attract the attention of the copyright holder. That in turn can lead to nasty letters from lawyers, lawsuits, and a host of legal woes.

Warning

Do not use copyrighted sound effects in your games. This includes sounds from movies, TV shows, and other games.

When you're using your favorite search engine to find sound effects on the Web, use phrases such as "royalty free sound effects" as your search keywords. If you include the term "royalty free," you'll find collections of sound effects that very skilled sound effects experts produce and sell. You'll typically pay from $25 to $150, depending on the size of the collection you're ordering, for CDs containing hundreds or thousands of sounds.

Tip

Always ensure that sound effect collections you buy are royalty free.

It's important to ensure that the sound effect collections you order specify that you do not have to pay royalties for commercial uses of the sound effects. If the collection is not specified as royalty free, don't use it. If the collection requires you to pay royalties, you'll have to pay some money to the author of the collection for each copy of your game that you sell. This can really cut into your profits.

There's one more thing to be careful of when you're buying collections of sound effects: Some sound effect collections specify that they are for noncommercial use only. You can't legally use them in games that you sell.

Making your Own Sound Effects

Sound effects experts commonly use a few different techniques for creating their own sound effects. Most of the techniques they employ are available to you as well for not a lot of money.

Using Real-World Sounds

One technique that audio experts use is to record sounds they find in the real world and then alter those sounds with audio editor software. Audio editors enable you to cut, paste, and combine sounds. They also let you change the pitch of recorded sounds, slow them down, speed them up, and apply many other sound transformations.

Note

If you want to be able to save MP3 files with Audacity, you must go to the project's download page at http://audacity.sourceforge.net/download/windows and follow the instructions for downloading the LAME MP3 encoder.

Professional audio editing software can get very expensive very quickly. However, to get you started, I've included an open source audio editor called Audacity on the CD with this book; it's in the folder Tools\Audacity. The home page for the Audacity software is at http://audacity.sourceforge.net.

Generating Sounds on an Electronic Keyboard

Another approach to making sound effects is to generate them with an electronic keyboard. Many inexpensive musical keyboards come with a standard set of sound effects. You can record those effects by connecting a wire from the keyboard's headphone output jack (or from the Line Out jack) to the microphone jack (or the Line In jack) on your computer's sound card. Use a recording program, such as Windows Recorder, to record the sound. You can also use Audacity for sound recording. After you record the sound, you can use Audacity, or another audio editor, to alter it in any way you want.

Using Sound EffectsGeneration Software

A third technique for making sound effects is to use sound effectsgeneration software. A good way to find sound effectsgeneration software that meets your needs is to read the software reviews at emusician.com. Sound effectsgeneration programs typically generate effects using MIDI commands. As a result, most game developers digitally record the sound effects and distribute them as MP3 files.