MacMost Now 194: Adding Custom Sounds For Mac Events

On this MacWorld Expo special take a look at Sounds4Fun, software that allows you to attach sounds to all sorts of events on your Mac.

Video Transcript: Gary Rosenzweig:  Hi, this is Gary with MacMost Now.  On today's episode, let's find out how to apply sounds to actions and events that happen on your Mac.
So I get asked this question a lot.  'How can I apply a sound to an event or an action that I take on my Mac?'  You can change the system alert sound, but that one sound is used for a whole bunch of things.  How can you have a specific sound for a specific event?  Well, it turns out you can, using software called Sounds4Fun.  I caught up with Ricardo, the creator of Sounds4Fun, and the MacWorld Expo this month.
Ricardo Ettore:  And what it allows you to do is to assign a different sound to any of up to 70 different events.  Now events can be things like, you type a key, for example, and you might have a typewriter sound, or a drumming sound, or whatever sound you want.  You put something in the trash, or you empty the trash, or you launch a find or copy, or maybe you're backing something up and you want to be alerted when it's finished.  Or maybe you want to hear a sound when the power to your laptop is cut, either because there's a power cut or maybe somebody tripped into the cord and you're not aware and suddenly the power's gone off.  Or you put your computer to sleep, and maybe it goes 'yawn', and you wake it up, and it has a different kind of yawn. So it's mainly to have fun, as the name implies, Sounds4Fun.  But you could argue that some of them could be useful, such as, you type the Caps Lock key and you hear a sound, so it could help you not look up at the screen and find out that you've been shouting in all caps for the last several sentences.  In a nutshell, that's what it is.  You could even play pranks on people by having sounds that play when they type a certain word, but equally it could be something that trains you not to reuse the same words.  You're trying to avoid saying 'nice' all the time, you'd like to be alerted that you're using that word too many times, so have a sound that says 'not again' or something like that.
So Sounds4Fun installs a system preference on your system and it also installs a background application.  And fundamentally, you can see that you have a whole set of events, and you can see that an event has a sound associated with it.  For example, when the clock strikes on the hour, you will hear the grandfather clock chime, the .aif file.  Next to a particular event, and a sound, you see three icons.  The X is if you want to remove the sound, so that particular event will be silent, the magnifying glass is the search icon, so if you click, it will actually reveal in Finder where that sound is, and the play button actually will play the sound (I don't know if you have the sound turned on, but that's that particular sound).  To assign a sound, you can actually drag it and drop it on the actual event that you want to assign it to.  The phrases, this is where you can add a phrase and a sound to it, and other than that, you can have applications for which you say either do not play any sounds in that application, or play sounds in a different sense.  In the settings, you can even have something that announces when an iTunes song starts playing.  So if you're in a room, and you are playing your iTunes through your Mac, when the next song starts playing, you will hear one of the Mac voices announce it; it will actually tell you the song and the artist's name, which could be cool if you can't remember necessarily what you have in your iTunes collection.  Also here, you can say that the idle talk interval is a number of minutes.  Now idle talk is something quite funny, because if you don't touch your computer for those minutes, it will then start saying something to you.
Gary:  You can find out more and try the software out at ettoresoftware.com.  Until next time, this is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now.

Comments: 2 Responses to “MacMost Now 194: Adding Custom Sounds For Mac Events”

Lynn Kilbane

12 years ago

Can the information in this video (1/27/09) be applied to the current Mac OS 10.8.2, or do you recommend a different way to apply specific sounds to specific events?
Thanks.

Gary Rosenzweig

I would look up the developer's web site and see if they support ML and perhaps contact him to ask.

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MacMost Now 194: Adding Custom Sounds For Mac Events

Comments: 2 Responses to “MacMost Now 194: Adding Custom Sounds For Mac Events”

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