sfxr – sound effects for all!
Been tinkering with this over the last couple of days.
EDIT: Official sfxr homepage – http://www.drpetter.se/project_sfxr.html
As the audio geek I am, I find it a bit unfortunate that most LD48 entries are usually silent. I figure it’s probably due to the authors not having a quick ‘n’ easy application at hand for making sound effects and therefore neglecting that aspect of the game in favor of code and, usually, graphics. Even simple sound effects can add a huge amount of immersion and fun to a game, though.
What I present here is, if you will, an MS Paint for sound effects… or something along those lines. It’s meant to make it dead easy for anyone to whip up a few simple sound effects and save them as .WAV files for playback using most game/media libraries like SDL or pygame.
Basic usage involves clicking the left-most buttons to automatically generate random sounds loosely targeted at certain categories. For more advanced users it’s possible to spend some additional time to manually create fairly varied and interesting sound effects.
The interface is based entirely around sliders for controlling sound parameters, along with a few buttons. Even if you don’t want to spend time learning about all the sliders you can still have some fun just hammering away at them and listening to the various sounds that come out.
Hopefully this will mean that there’s no longer any valid excuse for anyone to get N/A in sound!
Download: sfxr.zip (win32, 48 kB) – Latest update: 2007-12-15 (see screenshot)
EDIT: Apparently it sort of works in wine 0.9.50, though with some stability issues. Fortunately though, the good Gerry JJ/mjau managed to port it properly. Here’s a copy of his post:
I ported DrPetter’s excellent sfxr (info) to SDL, so it can now be compiled and run natively in Linux!
Download: sfxr-sdl.tar.gz
Just type ‘make’ to compile. You need SDL and GTK 2.
Source code is obviously included in the portable archive, and anyone is free to use or modify it for anything they please. There’s no need to credit me, although it would be nice if you did. I would also appreciate a little email note if you do create something cool based on my code.
If I get around to making a little update I’ll include source code in the win32 archive as well.
Tags: effects, explosions, fun, laser, random, sfxr, sound, tools
nice tool!
thanks to the author, and the two guys who posted mac versions. i’m running tiger on my intel mac, i found that volt’s ppc app appeared to work fine in rosetta – but i’ve also used his xcode project to compile an intel version. i didn’t change anything except telling xcode to build intel (i actually asked it to make a universal binary, but it didn’t seem to want to). i’ve not done thorough testing but had a bit of a play and it seems to work fine.
so, tiger-compatible intel version:
http://www.mediafire.com/?391wiynwrly
(sorry for the crap free web-hosting, feel free to mirror)
just realised, i didn’t alter the readme in the zip i just posted, so it still claims to be a ppc version. no biggie
Excellent stuff!
The only extra feature I could really want is the ability to easily (no need to tweak settings) generate clean looping sounds for engine noises and such.
I made a game and used your utility for a few sounds, here is the post with the link back to you: http://www.justnbusiness.com/Blogs/Drop_In.aspx
[...] Ludum Dare » Blog Archive » sfxr – sound effects for all! (tags: audio freeware gamedev music tools) [...]
sfxr: un generador de efectos de sonido…
sfxr es un sencillo generador de efectos sonoros de pequeño tamaño y sencillísimo uso; un programa verdaderamente útil para el programador de juegos….
[...] routines from the textbox code, allowing me to reuse the box style in other UI elements. Oh, and I messed around with sfxr a tad and made a few sound effects, only about two of which are included. Press Z to hear an [...]
Excellent, thank you. I’ll be using this for my upcoming game.
This is brilliant! Wonderfully quick and simple to use for spot effects, which is exactly what I was after. Many thanks!
This is awesome, it reminds me of Shoot ‘Em Up Construction Kit’s sound editor from waaaay back on the Atari ST and Amiga, anyone remember that? Or am I telling my own age? Well.. I was 3-5 years old when I had it, so nya!
Feel free to read an Interview with DrPetter on this SFXR at Digital Tools: http://digitaltools.node3000.com/5minutes/tomas_pettersson_on_sfxr_and_the_ludumdare_48hour_game_competition.php
[...] feeding finished the Ludum Dare contest’s blog, I institute a nifty lowercase agency which generates 8-bitish sfx, without me having to undergo [...]
What an amazingly sexy little program!
Look forward to hearing it all over my percussion bits in the future
Very nice program, it is much faster and easier than anything I’ve ever used before! Thank you very much!
[...] Sfxr von DrPetter ist ein kleines Tool, mit dem man auf ganz einfache Weise Effekte und Klänge im typischen 8-Bit-Spiele-Sound erzeugen kann. Das Ganze funktioniert über Schieberegler, mit denen sich Dauer, Frequenzen und diverse Filter einstellen lassen. Zudem lassen sich über Buttons Zufall-Sounds und Klänge aus Kategorien wie Pickup, Shoot, Powerup, Explosion und Jump generieren. [...]
Downloaded and compiled with no problems, and works great!
( ubuntu 7.10, previously had to do a sudo apt-get install libsdl1.2-dev libgtk2.0-dev g++ )
Thank you so much, cheers!
[...] a month ago, sfxr was [...]
The SDL port failed to start on my system, I needed to patch it.
Look here for the solution: http://blog.viridian-project.de/2008/01/24/retro-sound-effects-with-sfxr-sdl/
[...] Audacity. For the sound effects, I used DrPetter’s lovely retro sound effect generator, sfxr. If you happen to play guitar, you might be interested in the guitar tab for the in-game [...]
I’ve updated the SDL port with a fix for the SDL_OpenAudio issue (same dl link as before). Also, cancelling a save dialog would save to a random filename, fixed that too (thanks vegard =)).
I have to try this out!! so much good feedback
Thanks for the app. Incredibly useful and simple to use.
[...] best parts are the sound effects, made with the super awesome indie sound tool sfxr. I don’t know how I ever got by without [...]
Very cool! I’ve been wanting something just like this! The principle of allowing quick experimentation is dead-on.
One bug: If I save the file as 22K, both Windows Media Player and Game Maker refuse to recognize it. Oddly, QuickTime has no problem with them. 44K is fine across the board.
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[...] Discuss it here [...]
very simple and useful tool for 8-bit sounds, thanks a lot.
http://www.isoundfx.com
I love that tool, ‘cos it’s simple and effective!
I’ve made a retro-flashgame. all sounds have been created with SFXR!
Take a look: http://finefin.com/games/bugbc.htm
Best ever.
Mixed with the swave instrument in Musagi, thing’s get quite interesting
Wow! I just downloaded it not expecting too much and then this! Great work!!!
Wow it’s so good Pro i’ll get it now
thanks so much for this fantastic tool
THANK YOU!
OMG, this program… this program OMG! DrPetter, this program…OMG!
Something small .. but nonetheless very useful. One might say the degree of usability is in inverse proportion to its size
Great work!
I’ve made a real Cocoa port of sfxr, which is an universal Mac binary with proper saving and exporting with mac dialogs and all. Eh, I hope that was okay, I didn’t look for a license on the original source code, and I couldn’t find one now that I looked.
Anyways, I call it cfxr and it’s available at http://thirdcog.eu/apps/cfxr . Enjoy!
[...] 地址：http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2007/12/13/sfxr-sound-effects-for-all/ [...]
Thanks you very much.
this is wonderful!!!!!!
WIKKID!
Will save hours of sound effect tweaking so I can get back to wasting my time playing games. Thank you.
Did two things and sfxr is running on my MacOSX 10.5.4 with no problems:
1) Changed sklkit.h line 95 from,
#include
into,
#include
2) Added the following alias to .bashrc file,
alias sfxr=’cd /Users/ppffffft/Programs/SourceCode/CPP/sfxr-sdl; ./sfxr’ # sfxr must be run from its home directory
Seems the
#include \
and the
#include \
got mangled in prior entry.
I am curious about the chances of getting the gui shrunk a bit and ported to the nintendo ds. It would be great to have a softsynth on the ds that can generate one-shot wav files for use in nitrotracker. iirc, there is an sdl lib available for the nds.
What a brilliant little application – perfect for someone like me who doesnt know his reverb from his elbow.
Thanks very much!
Great tool, especially since I was tired of looking at pre-recorded SFX of low quality that didn’t match each other!
Great SFX Tool! Big Thanks to DrPetter!
great tool! I will add a post about it soon
Brilliant SFX tool saves sooo much time!