What programs are available to help make sound loops and effects for games?
I used to use Garage Band on the Mac but its broke at the moment so looking for something on the PC.
Maybe Sound Forge?
What do you use?
Thanks for any help
Geoff
yeah sound forge rocks and its so easy to use!
There is also Audacity, cross-platform and free…
Hi,
Sound Forge is cool for editing sounds, like cutting them and putting some FX in.
AFAIK its not very useful for actually “creating” sounds, at least Version 6 I was using some years ago.
Personally I am using Cubase for creating sounds, but it’s $$$.
There is a “light” version for 150 $ , though.
Reason could be very handy , Fruity Loops , too. But these are more or less tools for musicians, I dont know if they are suitable for your personal needs.
I am sure there are others, but they dont come into my mind right now.
–
oxl
Hello, I tested many, many softwares for music SFX creation/editing.
For music creation, Fruity Studio XXL is awesomely cheap for what it can do (300$ and nearly as good as pro Cubase).
For sound editing, I do prefer Adobe Audition (ex- Cool Edit).
Both are very simple to use, but yet ultra efficient.
Here is some tunes I made long ago with Fruity Studio (ex Fruity Loops) coupled with Audition.
But overall, if you search the most professional and complete tool, Cubase is unbeatable.
Personally, I use Steinberg Cubase + Native Instruments Komplete 5 + Kore 2; and some extra VST-synths and FX. What I can certainly recommend for spaced out sound FX are the plugins by Ohm Force. That’s probably not a setup you’d want to purchase just for creating sound FX - but since I’m also creating all my music myself I found this to be a worthy investment. What I’m usually doing for sfx is take some preset that’s “pretty close” to what I need to start with and then tweak until it exactly fits my needs - so it’s really nice to have Kore 2 because that provides a rather huge library that is pretty well-organized 
In the last issue of the Unity Developer Magazine (Issue 2) there was also an interview with Marcus Zetterquist, a co-founder of Propellerhead Software, who uses Reason and WireTap Pro (seemingly only available for Mac) to create sound FX in a really interesting way
Another approach that may be interesting to look into is actually recording “real world sounds” and then optimizing them for your specific needs. Or, if you want to save time, get some sfx libraries and start from there
Haha yeah, I can’t wait to be in my sound development phase, just to tweak a watermelon slap and make it sound like a huge hit in the face 
There are many good audio editing programs available; most are commercial. WaveEdit, CoolEdit, SoundForge and more. I m using Audacity because this program is completely free to download and use: http://audacity.sourceforge.net
It’s as good as superior. Very nice program to record e.g. old cassettes and LP’s to digital format [preferably mp3, 128mbits, 44khz, dual-channel].
For effect editing I prefer Adobe Audition (Which is basically CoolEdit bought over by Adobe and made to look pretty).
Music and sequencing wise I’ve experimented with many sequencers… Used Cubase for a while, played with reason, use Logic on the Mac (+ Virus TI and a whole bunch of other synths)when producing stuff with a friend of mine.
But honestly the most productive, most fun, and best bang for buck sequencer in my opinion is FLStudio.
I’m using the Producer edition and I recommend just adding on Sytrus+Maximum+Biohazard, and then whatever VST instruments you like.
Also, when you buy it you get lifetime free updates.
Other sequencers like Cubase and Logic try and push you into an upgrade for a list of negligible features, and the hope that bugs will be fixed, and I’ve found the same with everything that Native Instruments releases. I was a keen Reaktor user for a while, but it just became more buggy and unstable the higher the release numbers went. Maybe the Kore products are better, but I’ve got different priorities these days.
I love the instruments NI made(http://www.native-instruments.com/#/en/products/), like the FM8 and Absynth. A few minutes playing around with these and ZACK new cool sound made. It’s just great fun to use.
For easily generating retro-styled sound effects, you can’t beat this program:
SFXR
http://www.drpetter.se/project_sfxr.html
Garbage.
Native Instruments tools can sound awesome. I personally can’t use them anymore though, because they are so ugly. They really kick-started the whole softsynth market, but they haven’t been able to bring their UI up to the level of their DSP. Maybe someday.
Jessy: Hmmm: yeah. I guess that was a bit of a rant, slight bitterness there when dealing with those companies.
But I still maintain that FLStudio is the best value for money.
If you’re looking for free and experimental VST’s to plug into your sequencer of choice though, you can look here:
Well, if you’ve got an iPod Touch or iPhone, a couple apps might be of use for this sort of things, Noise.io Pro and Jasuto Synth.
While Noise.io is primarily intended for musicians, it has a huge wealth of tools that can take different waveforms, alter their properties and then use those modified waveforms to alter the properties of other waveforms. It’s possible that any kind of sound one can think of could potentially be recreated procedurally with such an app simply by altering a few settings.
Jasuto Synth is a signal patch editor that allows you to build your own audio filters from scratch using a bunch of circles that represent everything from hardware inputs/outputs to wave form generators to snippits of code (like math functions) that can be linked into one another to form a working flowchart representation of the patches you’ve created. Each circle can be configured to modify the properties of any other circle their connected with, allowing for a surprising level of complexity from an otherwise simple-looking app.
I quite like the look of the FM8(http://www.m3ld.co.uk/blogimages/softsynths/fm8/FM8Screenshot_800px_06.jpg) but yea, some of the UI elements seems to be way to simple to take advantage of the full abilities of the software. At the other side I really enjoyed the first steps with it and the easy learning process =)
