We've noticed a meme traveling around Twitter lately that seems to be making people's days at the office a little more fun. Or, depending on how you look at it, making their coworkers' days just a little more annoying. What is this life-changing trend? Old-school sound effects buttons.
If you need a drummer to punctuate all your snappy remarks, like some kind of quirky late-night talk show host, visit Instant Rim Shot. If something doesn't quite go as planned for you or someone in the room with you, go to Sad Trombone. These are perhaps the two most indispensable sound effects in any jokester's repertoire.
Safari users, take note: this is where you finally get some use out of that Web Clip feature, so you can keep these in your Dashboard for the appropriate occasion. We hope you enjoy them -- or loathe them -- as much as we do.
In this day and age, who has time for reading? You don't -- obviously. There's this site out there called PimpMyNews and it reads blogs aloud for you using text-to-speech software. You can even listen to the stories on an iPhone or iPod Touch through the site, and the service will even let you transfer stories onto your regular ol' iPod.
Despite being perfect for those too busy (lazy?) to read blogs, the site could also work in favor of the blind and others unable to read regular text. And for the skeptics: the text-to-speech software does a surprisingly decent job at being very understandable and comfortable enough to listen to, but others may be annoyed by the non-human elements in the the voice.
As a music fan, sometimes you feel as if you have heard it all. Every music playing application feels generally the same without too much difference. One music playing application stands out in this regard. MXplay is a different kind of music experience, in that it allows you to move the speakers, thus altering the sound in it's 2D panel (as seen in the gallery below). You can also move your head to make the music sound different, have more depth or sound closer, behind you are just right to the angle of your head.
Move my head? Yes, but a digital head, not your real head. This digital head lets you spin to hear at different angles or slide side to side for interesting audio perception results. This feature of MXplay is by far the most fun to play with and can take you a while to begin to stop playing with it, so you might not want to try it at work.
The real value in MXplay is in the social networking aspect, or so it would seem. The social features of the app include the ability to mix in videos from YouTube, Google, and others to add to your audiospace. Once done, you can save and share audiospaces (even though some contain video) with other users of the application. You can also make recordings of the various speaker moves in a pattern that is also saved as a part of your audiospace.
Running this app on Vista worked just fine and shouldn't give you to much trouble, however the use of certain features wasn't very clear in some cases, and there doesn't seem to be extensive documentation by any means, but it is at least worth playing with to experience the pseudo 3D sounds it produces.
There are MXplay plugins for Nintendo Wiimote, Last.fm, and even one in the works for MP3tunes.com as well. so stay tuned!
This time waster isn't a game... it's more like a web toy. Neave Audio / Visual is a web-based audio visualizer, using Flash to access either your microphone or wave-in port.
The visualizations are simple, but effective. They're not going to win any awards for being super flashy, but unlike many other audio visualizations, these ones very obviously react to sound. It's particularly enjoyable to get some young children in front of the computer screen, and turn on a microphone. Once they start to see how the sounds they make are interpreted on-screen, you'll start hearing all sorts of interesting stuff. Keep some ear plugs handy, if you're going to follow this advice.
If you've ever tried to record streaming audio in Windows, like a Skype call or a webcast, you may be aware of a simple setting that allows you to record any sound playing through your computer's sound card. All you have to do is:
Select your sound properties through the control panel or the sound icon in your system tray.
Click on the properties tab.
Check the recording box.
Make sure Wave Out Mix is selected (It's sometimes called stereo mix, or mono mix).
Now you should be able to set Wave Out as your default for recordings made by Audacity or other audio recording programs.
But, if you try the same trick with Windows Vista, you won't see an option for Wave Out Mix. It's not that the option's been left out of Vista, Microsoft just decided to hide it. Media Center Show podcast producer Ian Dixon has the instructions for enabling Wave Out recording:
Select sound from the control panel.
Select the recording tab.
Right click on the background of the tab and choose "show disabled devices."
Right click on Wave Out Mix and click enable.
Now it should work the same way as Wave Out Mix in Windows XP, allowing you to record any sound your computer makes.
Awhile back I reported that Microsoft was considering making it impossible to disable the Windows Vista startup sound, short of physically turning off your speakers. I'm still getting comments on that post. Happily, Microsoft has reversed its position. In a post to the Windows Vista Team Blog product manager Nick White writes, "We heard you loud and clear when it came to discussing our plans to include a default start-up sound that plays as you boot-up Windows Vista: you said you wanted to have the opportunity to mute it if and when you felt it necessary." Going forward, Vista will have a (relatively) easy-to-find option in the Control Panel to disable the startup sound. Thanks for listening, Microsoft!
As a laptop user, I work in many different environments, sometimes with external speakers, sometimes with headphones, and sometimes (sadly) using only my laptop's tinny little speakers. In each of these different configurations I have different ways of controlling volume, or at least I did. Now I use Volumouse. Lifehacker pointed to this extremely useful little utility, which allows you to use your mouse wheel to control the volume of your system (or specific applications) depending on how you have it configured. It doesn't interfere at all with the regular use of your mouse wheel, and seems to be totally compatible with my other favorite mouse wheel utility, KatMouse.
Wendy at LifeHacker suggested configuring Volumouse to control your volume when the mouse pointer is anywhere on your taskbar, and I personally find that to be the ideal configuration.
Hmm, this is interesting. According to prominent former Microsoftie Robert Scoble, Microsoft's current plan is to make the Windows Vista startup sound a) unchangeable and b) unmutable. The reason for "a" is branding. Having a unified startup sound on all Vista PCs serves Microsoft well, and Microsoft's Steve Ball says users will benefit from "a short, brief, positive confirmation that your machine is now concious and ready to react." The reason for "b" is that the startup sound is good for troubleshooting--"The startup sound is designed to help you calibrate or fix something that got out of wack when you startup your machine. Let's say you muted your machine, and you don't hear your startup sound, you know you aren't ready to listen to stuff." This all sounds fairly reasonable, but as Scoble points out, this is exactly the sort of thing that turns power-users off most: they paid for the computer, they paid for Vista, they should be able to configure every last thing to their heart's content. This has apparently been Microsoft's plan for several months, but is yet to be set in stone. Ball says they are still listening to user feedback, and Microsoft is considering making it configurable through the registry or similar means for the sake of power-users. One thing's for certain: If Microsoft sticks to its current plan, the certainty of a freeware utility for easily changing or muting Vista's startup sound approaches 100%.
Since I've dumped Apple's email client for Gmail, I've come to miss a few minor features like having images accompany contacts in my address book and the emails I receive from them in the email app itself. As of yesterday, this is one feature I can scratch off my Gmail wishlist, as Google announced they are now rolling out contact pictures to Gmail, with some special sauce to boot. Not only will you be able to add pictures to contacts and see them in their emails you receive, but users can suggest pictures for each other. If you don't see these features in your Gmail account yet, have patience, grasshopper. Google said they're rolling these out to accounts over time, though they didn't specify an ETA for when they'll be done.
Another handy but less whiz-bang feature Gmail rolled out is sound for chat windows. You'll receive a ping for new chat messages now, and this feature is enabled by default (you can toggle it in the prefs). Oddly, you need to have Flash enabled in order to hear the ping.
Gmail's built-in Chat feature, which lets you use Google Talk within your web browser, is pretty handy, but I often find that a message has been waiting me for a long time before I notice the tab blinking at me. Gmail Chat Alert is an extension for Firefox that fixes that by sounding an audio notification when you get an IM in Gmail. Simple and effective.
We've noticed a meme traveling around Twitter lately that seems to be making people's days at the office a little more fun. Or, depending on how you look at it, making their coworkers' days just a little more annoying. What is this life-changing trend? Old-school sound effects buttons. 
This time waster isn't a game... it's more like a web toy. 
