Just a little 8-Bit intro to an ongoing series of 8-Bit ringtones.

Ugotsta – Eat Bits

Just a simple robotic voice saying, “Incoming Call”.

Ugotsta – Robotic Incoming Call

Here’s another great preset for the illustrious Synth1, called Jet Engine. The preset can be found in the Synth1 Presets MegaPack Vol.1. The sample is roughly 6 seconds long and the note being played is a 3-bar length c5 note. The volume fades out toward the end.

Synth1 FX – Jet Engine

Downloadable wavefile: Synth1 FX – Jet Engine

Just a simple, high-pitched synthesized ringing.

Ugotsta – Synthetic Ring

Another simple ringtone, a slightly low frequency ding sound.

Ugotsta – Low Ding

We’re back with another wonderful xoxos preset, this time for the awesome rain VSTi, a realistic rain modeling plugin. This preset, one of the many factory included presets, is called rainfall. Throw some quality reverb over it and enjoy the soothing sound of synthesized rainfall.

xoxos rain – rainfall

Downloadable wavefile: xoxos rain – rainfall

A subtle variation on our ealier beep ringtone, this has a more futuristic interface sound to it.

Ugotsta – Interface Beep Beep Beep

xoxos develops incredible experimental audio plugins and his wind VSTi is an awesome example of his ingenuity at this genre. It’s an attempt to model the sound of wind and I think it excels at this. This preset, arctic wind, comes as a factory preset and it’s a good example of this plugin’s diversity.

xoxos wind – arctic wind

Downloadable wavefile: xoxos wind – arctic wind

I made this for an old snowglobe software I developed a while ago and I happen to like it. A cool, celesta tune with a winter vibe.

Ugotsta – Snowglobe

Something I’ve wanted for my phone for some time, just a very simple sequence of 3 high-pitched beeps.

Ugotsta – Beep Beep Beep

We’ve just created a little website at InternetCardTrick.com that presents this very simple magic card trick that we’ve always enjoyed. The YouTube video demonstrates the trick possibly better than the website itself, but people might like the website for other information and also for ease of sharing.

Just another soothing, electronic ringtone to ease the stressed out soul:

Ugotsta – eLaxation

Two simple but very cool, text-to-speech synthesized talking ringtones, saying “You have a call”. Speech synthesis generated using TextAloud and two awesome commercial voices as follows:

AT&T Audrey – UK English

Audrey – You Have A Call

Neospeech Paul – American English

Paul – You Have A Call

A relaxing ringtone in the form of a short, synthetic drum sequence.

Ugotsta – Melodic Drums

Welcome to another “Make That Sound” tutorial where we guide you through the process of creating a particular sound from scratch. In this tutorial, we’ll again be using FLStudio, this time to create an airy swoosh sound like the sound you hear when waving a stick quickly through the air.

The Breakdown

Let’s begin. First, let’s open FL Studio and start with a fresh, new project.

1. In the main menu, open the Channels menu and select to Add One, then select to create a 3X Oscillator.
2. Now, select the newly created 3X Oscillator and go to the Channel Settings window. For all three of the oscillators, select Noise, as the oscillator shape. The “Noise” shape is the one with the squiggly line pictured.
3. Next, click to select the instrument tab, labelled INS, then click to select the volume tab labelled VOL. There is a toggle button located just to the left of the word “Time”. Click to toggle this button to turn on the volume Envelope.
4. Now locate the Filter section and click to open the drop-list, then select SVF LP, for the filter type.
5. The filter cutoff frequency has a knob labelled MODX. Turn this knob almost completely down, but enough that you can hear some sound if played.

The sound will, at first, barely be audible. You can turn up the channel volume and maybe add a gain effect, as we have, so that the sound can be heard better.

You can adjust some of the volume envelope knobs, but this is the basic sound.

The Result

And here’s an mp3 rendering of our own result:

Ugotsta – Make That Sound – Air Swoosh

Enter the bliss of simplicity with this soft and soothing, short and basic ringtone.

Ugotsta – Simple Bliss

I’ve never heard such a ringtone as this robotic voice speaking the simple word, “Ring”, and I felt the world absolutely must have it, so here it is.

Ugotsta – Robotic Ring

Relive the golden days of Nintendo gaming with this 8-bit rendition of the traditional phone ring.

Ugotsta – 8-Bit Traditional Ring

This is the first in our releases of audio plugin preset samples. These will be simple references for people wishing to hear, not only what particular plugins are capable of, but what particular presets for them sound like. This is in response to the question, “What does this VST sound like?”

Synth1 is a monstrous, free VST instrument. Here’s a great preset for it called Drop, which coincidentally sounds somewhat like water drops. The preset can be found in the Synth1 Presets MegaPack Vol.1. For those familiar with Synth1 presets, the Drops preset is located in the first folder, “128 by AudioWhore Bank” and can be copied over any of Synth1′s existing sounbanks folders. The sample is roughly 4 seconds long and the note being played is a bar-length c5 note. The volume fades out toward the end.

Synth1 FX – Drops

Downloadable wavefile: Synth1 FX – Drops

TextAloud is a simple, yet very powerful software for working with various speech synthesis voices. The same company delivering TextAloud also provides access to an unreal number of synthesized voices through their website. Check out our demonstration video of the software.

Introduction

I’ve had this one piece of software sitting on my computer for quite some time now just waiting to be used and I’ve finally come across a situation where it’s provided quite a bit of excitement. TextAloud and the voices available for it are simply stunning. The degree of realism in the speech synthesis engines is stuff of the near future, publicly delivered now and strangely, they’ve been available for quite some time. In fact, the software has been sitting on my computer for some years, though I just never found so much use for it all as I have lately, having just assembled tutorials where I needed clean vocal recordings.

The Voices

There are a number of speech synthesis voices available from a variety of providers such as AT&T, RealSpeak and Cepstral spanning the gamut of language and accents from across the globe, even having male and female variants (I should mention that my favorite happens to be AT&T’s Audrey, a UK-English speaking female voice). All of these voices are available from the website of TextAloud’s developer, NextUp.com.

The Program

While there are a number of text-to-speech softwares out there, I consider TextAloud to be one of the very best, if not the very best. It provides a bulk of options for customizing speech output, yet the interface is childishly simple. You simply type in the text you wish it to speak, make sure the voice you want to speak with is selected and select Speak.

Regarding features, TextAloud provides for various clipboard options so that users can easily speak whatever is copied into the clipboard. There’s a Speak to File option for wave-file rendering of the speech output and there’s an option for batch recording, for those who can’t sit at the computer waiting for each file to render, though the rendering is actually quite fast.

This thing is expensive!

The TextAloud program itself is quite inexpensive, but the individual voices can rack up quite a bill. NextUp sells various packaged versions with voices included which tends to bring the voice prices down a bit, but the voices are still a bit out of most average people’s price range. However, given the quality of the voices, especially in comparison to what people are most commonly accustomed to hearing from voice synthesis, it’s very much worth it. I purchased a few voices some years ago and while I used them occasionally for rendering text to speech to listen rather than read, I’ve found them immeasurably useful as of late and they were already payed for long ago.

For more information on TextAloud and the various voices available for it, click here or just click on any of the above links.

Recreate that smooth glissando slide from the classic Anita Ward disco hit, Ring My Bell. This first in what we hope to be a never-ending series of tutorials on how to create particular sounds, utilizes the immensely awesome FLStudio software to create a rather simple but undeniably cool sound.

NOTE: This being our first video tutorial, please excuse the lackluster feel. Things will improve over the course of these releases.

The Breakdown

And now we have the textual breakdown for those who can’t access the YouTube video walkthrough. To begin with, let’s just open up FLStudio and get started.

1. Open a new project and create a 3X Ooc (From the main menu, select CHANNELS -> Add one -> 3X Osc).
2. Over in the 3X Osc Channel Settings window, turn the volume completely down on OSC 2 and OSC 3.
3. Now, from that same Channel Settings window, select INS from the tab bar, then select VOL from the secondary tab bar that appears. Click to toggle and turn on the Envelope button right next to TIME.
4. Turn down all the knobs (VEL, ATT, HOLD, DEC), except SUS, which you should turn up the whole way. Then turn the REL knob to the halfway point.5. Now select the PITCH tab and click to toggle and turn on the Envelope button next to TIME.
5. Again, turn down the knobs (VEL, ATT, HOLD, DEC), except SUS, which you’ll turn up the whole way, and REL, which should be halfway, and also turn up the whole way, the AMT knob at the end of the knob lineup.
6. Play it! The note, we’ve found, is G3, so playing that as a quick stab ought to produce the precise sound we’re looking for. Play it in the keyboard or throw it in the piano-roll editor as a quick 1/2 step note.

The Results

We have here our own finished version of the sound.

How To Make That Sound – Ring My Bell

And here’s a YouTube video of Anita Ward lip-syncing her famous hit.
You can play the above sound alongside this for comparison.

A Few Words About the Video Tutorial

The voice in the tutorial is AT&T’s Audrey, a UK-English speaking synthesized voice. We used TextAloud from NextUp.com to achieve this voicing. For more information, click here.

The video tutorial was ultimately exported from Microsoft’s Movie Maker which produced some strange bug on export where the audio is chopped a slight bit at the beginning.

I recently stumbled upon this pretty amazing PHP database software. It works very much like the free and open-source phpMyAdmin, but it provides a slew of very powerful additions that are far more than worth the very low fee currently being charged for it. It takes the phpMyAdmin interface in a more intuitive direction with a far simpler interface and it also enhances the experience with features similar to Microsoft Access and Filemaker, making it a viable web-based MySQL database editor or perhaps even a purely browser-based Access or Filemaker clone.

Check it out for yourself at codecanyon.net.