Exercises with Sound

Exercises with Sound

To complete these exercises you'll need the Microsoft Sound Recorder or other sound editing software and Microsoft Media Player or other playback software capable of playing Windows Media (WMA) files.

If it doesn't already exist, create a folder under your My Documents folder called My Sound.

Your lesson is to create an American military medley from these four pieces:

You can be as creative as you like. Here's how to do it:

First problem:

You can't open WMA files with the Sound Recorder. It only supports WAVE files. If it did support WMA files you could simple open one, then insert each of the other files. But it doesn't support WMA files so we have to convert the source to WAVE format.

At this point most people are thinking about going surfing to find a conversion utility but that isn't necessary.

If you have Windows Media Player installed you can just double click on the first link above and open the US Navy's theme then press the stop button while you get your Sound Recorder setup.

The MS Sound Recorder is a far better piece of software than you might first suspect but you have to be tricky to get it to do what you want. The biggest problem with it is that by default it will only record 60 seconds of sound. First trick, make the recording time longer:

Open a copy of Sound Recorder, press the record button and wait one minute. The position on the left will show you progress. When you've recorded a minute of silence (or anything else that happens to be playing through your computer) save it to disk as two different files. We used 1.wav and 2.wav but it doesn't matter.

Next load 2.wav and from the Edit menu insert 1.wav over and over until you have enough room for your new project. We opted for 440 seconds for no good reason.

Press the record button on the Sound Recorder then press the play button on the Media Player.

When the player reaches the end of the selection or has gone as far as you want, press the stop button on the recorder. You could now trim off the end of the file and save it as a wave file or you can load the next Windows Media File by double clicking on the link.

When the player reaches the end of the selection or has gone as far as you want, press the stop button on the recorder. As before, you could trim off the end of the file and save it as a wave file or you can load the next Windows Media File by double clicking on the link.

We decided to keep appending each segment one after the other so we had a little bit more than 280 seconds of recorded music and the rest was junk.

We played the piece to see how it sounded, pumped up the volume by 25% and then saved it to the folder we created at the start of the lesson.

Try the special effects....

Now let's compress the file to make it smaller.

To complete this exercise you'll need Windows Media Encoder.

The Windows Media page is here:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/en/download/default.asp

Pick the encoder from the dropdown menu:

The Windows Media Encoder (WMEnc.exe) is typically installed on the drive where the Windows folder resides under Program Files\Windows Media Components\Encoder\WMEnc.exe. For example if your Windows folder reside on your C: drive the path to WMEnc.exe would be:

C:\Program Files\Windows Media Components\Encoder\WMEnc.exe

We saved our sound file as USArmedForcesMedley.wav so we're going to rename it first to US_Armed_Forces_Medley.wav then load it using the New Session Wizard.

The File Selection window allows you to browse for a source and output file.

We started off with a low quality mono file so we used monaural Audio for FM Radio which translates to Windows Media Audio V8, Mono 22.1 kHz.

Here we can enter any branding information about the file. This is the copyright and artist information that you see while a multimedia file is being played back in Media Player.

The process took 9 seconds and we reduced the size from 6,030 KB to 701 KB without giving up any quality whatsoever. Pretty good.