Tag Archives: sound

Define Multiple Sound Profiles In Windows For Different Times Of Day

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We’ve covered apps that let you manage networks, and then we've also reviewed some that allow you to manage your daily tasks. But how about an app that could let you manage, or more precisely, automate your speaker’s volume? Speaker Admin is a Windows app that does exactly that, allowing its users to automate their volume level according to the time of the day. You can basically specify time slots during which you want the volume to stay at a certain level. You can also entirely shush it down at night by selecting the mute option. If you’re among those of us who usually leave their speakers at full volume but don’t want to hear complains from their family, roommates or neighbors regarding their distasteful music choice, Speark Admin can come very handy. Further details after the jump. Read More

How To Change The Notification Center Alert Sound In OS X

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The Notification Center is one of the highlights of Mountain Lion, and we've written about a few handy Notification Center tips to help you make the best of it, including one on changing the Notification Center background. It is still a relatively new feature of the OS, and some might go so far as to call it rough around the edges for the simple reason that customizing it is difficult. Even something as basic as changing the sound alert for the Notification Center isn't supported, at least not in the stock System Preferences. It is still possible to do so, and we've got the instructions for you. Read More

Silence For Android Gets Holo UI, Calendar Events, Power Toggles & More

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Silence – the handy event-based sound profile automation app for Android – has received a pretty impressive update in the Play Store today. Besides sporting a shiny new Holo UI, the app now allows you to play around with several other volume and power toggles, so that you can use it to completely automate your Android device’s behavior as per your requirements. Already capable of automatically switching back and forth between user-selected sound levels during and after certain events, Silence can now toggle Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and mobile data as well. The app’s integration with Google Calendar now allows you to import events from your personal calendar, so that you can easily define your device’s volume and power settings during your events. That’s not all – there is also support for recurring events till a particular date, and you can now set a specific volume level for each sound toggle instead of silencing it completely. Details to follow. Read More

Configure Your Home Theater To Perfection With THX tune-up For iOS

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For decades, cinemas and commercial theaters have been making use of THX standards to ensure high quality of audio and video. THX offers a set of rules for the optimal viewing experience on any medium, complete with guidelines to set up speakers, displays and projectors with ease. Until now, THX has mostly been useful for cinema owners but with the advent of home theaters and better television sets, the brains behind the standard set have resolved to make THX mainstream. THX tune-up is a newly released iOS app that helps you set up your own media equipment properly, according to THX standards. Not only does it have detailed tutorials, but the app also scans your devices for perfect sound, color, screen and connection settings. The instructions are available in both text and audio formats, making THX tune-up a perfect companion for configuring a full home theater without being a rocket scientist. Read More

Manage & Automate Android Sound Profiles With Smart Volume Control

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Smart Volume Control is a powerful multilingual sound profile management app for Android that vows to be the ultimate solution for your device’s volume adjustment, automation and tweaking needs. Besides supporting hyper-customizable sound profiles, the app brings to the table several features that are hard to find in most similar solutions. For instance, it offers multiple profile presets under a accelerometer-controlled Speed Volume Mode that can be availed to activate personalized sound settings for when you’re out on the road, cycling, or crossing a subway. The app lets you schedule activation of profiles according to desired time, or as per your Google and/or Microsoft Exchange calendar events. Want your device to automatically silence, or redirect incoming calls to Bluetooth when at your workplace? Smart Volume Control’s location-based profile automation has your back. Then there is a fully customizable profile for when your headphones are plugged in to your device. The app’s many thoroughly customizable widgets allow you to play around with the desired sound profiles and settings directly from the home screen itself. Read More

Set System Volume To Decrease Over Time Before Hitting The Bed

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When I go to sleep at night, I like to play my favorite playlist in Windows Media Player. Even though, it has a built-in auto volume leveling enhancement, some of the tracks have sudden bursts of high sound, which can prove to be quiet disturbing when I am trying to sleep. Like me, a lot of other people do the same. They like to listen to music, a radio stream or a podcast when they lie down to sleep and a sudden burst of loud volume can disturb them (especially if the next track has higher volume than the current playing track). If you are one of those people who love to listen to your favorite playlist when going to sleep and want to avoid such situations, VolumeOut is your friend. It's a lightweight and portable app for Windows that lets you set a countdown timer. Once set, it will gradually reduces the volume from the current state to zero. Read More

Add “Download Now” Button To SoundCloud [Chrome]

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SoundCloud is a great website for original music or if you’re just looking for popular songs covered by aspiring singers. Some of the songs or instrumentals you find are truly amazing, so amazing that you might want to put them to download and spare your bandwidth. There are many ways to easily download songs from SoundCloud since it isn’t illegal and the website isn’t notorious for housing copy right protected material. SoundCloud Storm is a Chrome extension that provides just one more way to download a song from SoundCloud. Like other extensions (and there is a respectable number of them in the Chrome Web Store) this one embeds itself in SoundCloud’s interface. Unlike most other extensions, it provides a single click option to begin the download and ensures the file is saved with the correct name. You do not have to right-click a song and choose "Save as" from the context menu making SoundCloud Storm more convenient. Read More

LabChirp: Create Sound Effects From Ready-Made Or Custom Presets

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Hollywood studio giants use various audio tools and a bunch of different techniques to create high quality sound effects to use in movies, games and other video production projects. Well, opting for such quality definitely can't be achieved without the use of high-end equipment and top of the line software, but if you require to create some top-notch sound effects, without having to empty your wallet over professional software, then look no further than LabChirp. It’s a free Windows utility for creating sound effects for movies, music or video games. It comes packed with several sound presets and allows you to create your own as well. You can work with multiple channels, specifying the waveform and adjusting the amplitude, frequency/volume modulation for each, to quickly and easily generate the required audio effect. With its extensive set of features and simple GUI, the tool can prove to be quite handy for amateur movie makers, composers and game developers. Read More

Slider Widget: Android Homescreen Widget With Brightness & Volume Sliders

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Slider Widget, as implied by its name, is a handy 4x1 homescreen widget for Android that presents you with various sliders to manually adjust the levels of your device’s brightness and different volume settings. The widget comprises six different buttons, using which you can control your device’s screen brightness, ringtone volume, music volume, notification volume, alarm volume and the overall system volume of your device. Tapping any of the aforementioned buttons on the widget reveals a slider that can be used to manually adjust the corresponding levels of the selected component. The brightness slider carries an additional option of letting you enable the automatic brightness mode with a mere tap. The ringtone slider, apart from letting you adjust volume levels accordingly, contains a couple of thresholds so that you can easily put your device to silent as well as vibration mode. Don’t fancy swiping on the slider? You can use your device’s hardware volume keys to adjust the levels as desired. In addition, the widget also offers you the option of binding the notification and ringtone volumes together so that you do not have to adjust both said volumes individually when the need of doing so arises. The widget also lets you use each of its buttons as a separate toggle, so that you can instantly switch between any two predefined values/levels of a selected category. On the customization front, you get the option of adjusting the widget’s on-screen appearance by modifying the slider position. Read More

iSounds: Add Custom Sound Effects To iOS Actions [Cydia Tweak]

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If you have a jailbroken iOS device, then you should know that the Cydia Store is full of themes for making graphical changes to your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch, but what if you want to make changes to the sound effects on offer in Apple’s mobile platform? There are a few options for that as well, but iSounds is a Cydia app which covers just about every aspect of sound effects related to iOS. This app offers popular sound profiles for your iPhone, including Windows XP effects, Mac OS 9 sounds and a whole lot more. Read on to know how you can use this handy Cydia app to revamp the sounds your iDevice produces. Read More

Scup: Cross-Platform Batch Audio Track Uploader For SoundCloud

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Established in 2007, SoundCloud is arguably the most popular online audio distribution platform for collaboration, promotion and distribution of audio content by artists and music promoters. While the web version of the platform is a no brainer for anyone who is familiar with the service, we don’t usually come across a lot of desktop applications catering to SoundCloud. For that reason, when we stumbled across Scup (short for SoundCloud Uploader), we considered it worthy of being taken for a spin. In its essence, Scup is an Adobe AIR-based, cross-platform application that lets you upload multiple tracks to your SoundCloud account and create a set on the fly. The application supports specifying all necessary parameters, such as genre, set and track types, license, record label etc, making your sets ready for publishing in every sense. Read More

Auto Vibrate Automatically Enables Silent Mode According To Location Or Time [Android]

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Sifting through a mobile phone's various sound and alert profiles on a frequent basis can prove to be quite cumbersome, especially if you’re often required to visit several places on a daily basis, and adjust the sound of your device accordingly. Obviously, there are plenty of apps to offer help in this regard, like recently reviewed Audio Control and others, which help you define and switch to a user-defined sound profile with a mere tap. However, all such apps require you to pull your device out of the pocket each time you want to switch to a different profile. Enter Auto Vibrate – a free Android app that lets users specify multiple locations as well as time spans where and when their device is automatically switched to silent mode, saving you the hassle of manually switching between ringer and silent/vibrate mode on your device while going to sleep, attending an important conference, or stepping into the classroom. Read More

Audio Control: Define & Switch Between Multiple Sound & Alert Profiles [Android]

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We’ve seen some very effective ways of instantly switching to a user-defined volume present on Android with sound profile management apps, such as, Volume Rocker, Fine Volume Control and Volume Sync. Adding to the long list of apps from said genre is Audio Control, a free tool that lets you define volume profiles as per requirement. There is no restriction on the number of profiles that can be created, and for each profile, you can specify individual volume levels for your calls, ringer, notifications, media, alarms, speaker phone and the operating system itself. In addition, the app provides you with an option to specify a custom ringer mode (silent, vibrate or normal) and separate vibration settings for your calls and notifications. With Audio Control, not only can you set the required vibration intensity level, but also view all volume levels within the currently active sound profile on your homescreen using the app's customizable widgets. Read More

Free Ringtones: Load Up Your Windows Phone 7 With Custom Ring Sounds

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A lot of developers have been quick to make use of the custom ringtones capability recently bestowed upon Windows Phone 7 users by the Mango update. But, unfortunately, almost all of those apps have either been paid or limited (with respect to the number of downloadable ringtones). So the Marketplace needed a free and comprehensive portal for ringtones. Free Ringtones isn’t quite comprehensive but it is absolutely free and allows you to download as many ringtones to your WP7 device as you want! Read More

Create Online Backup Of Sound Editing Workstation Projects With Gobler

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The professional sound editing workstation project folder normally takes around 500 MB of disk space and in some cases, project files can take up disk space in gigabytes. Therefore, it’s a not a good idea of using cloud service which doesn’t allow uploading more than 2GB or 5GB of data and compels you to go for paid plans to get more storage space. If you don’t want to fork out on creating music production project backups, we have the best alternative of paid data sync services for you. Gobler is a cloud based data storage service which gives 25 GB of free space to music producers, publishers, composer, professional sound engineers, etc. Gobler has been specifically designed for anyone who works on hefty sound related projects and wants to create backup of project files in real-time. It natively supports all the widely popular sound editing suites including, Neundo, GarageBand, Logic, ProTools, Ableton Live, Cubase, Reaper, Digital Performer, Record, Reason, and Studio One. Read More

How To Turn Off Windows Phone 7 Camera Click Sound [Hack]

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Windows Phone 7 is a nice platform overall, but in some departments the tendency of Microsoft to act like a strict school headmaster clearly shows. We all know Windows is pretty big on security and privacy, but sometimes this could turn into a nuisance and annoyance for the end users. Lack of features like accessibility to hidden Wi-Fi networks and MMS issues somewhat tarnish the WP7 experience. Another such feature that has caused a few raised eyebrows is the ever-present camera shutter sound. No matter what you do, it just refuses to go away (except on a few devices). On most other smartphone, or even feature phone, platforms, the camera shutter sound follows the overall profile of the device. This means that if you put your device into silent mode, the camera will be silenced as well. This is not the case in Windows Phone, unfortunately. Want to get rid of the annoying “click”? Read More

How To Enhance Samsung Omnia 7 Headphone Sound

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Music is an integral part of many people’s daily lives. And your phone is your constant companion which is always with you and lets you enjoy the music of your choice on the go. Many people attribute the iPhone's success to focus on music, and that is quite true. It is a common sight today to see a person walking down a road with headphones plugged into their ears. This constant obsession with music has been fuelled even further thanks to the latest rise to fame of smartphones. Android, iOS and Windows Phone all lay special emphasis on letting users listen to their favorite songs in an optimal and convenient manner. Samsung Omnia 7 is a Windows Phone 7 device which comes with pretty good acoustic properties. And that’s why you can really enjoy it’s headphones (specially if you got the original Samsung ones with your device). But if you feel that there’s still room for improvement, you can increase the headphone volume of this device using the procedure described below! Read More

Increase Speaker Volume In Samsung Omnia 7 [Guide]

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Samsung Omnia 7 is the phone I personally use, and to be honest, I am quite in love with it. However, my first disagreement with it arose when I was late for work in the morning because I missed my alarm. Being a heavy sleeper, the speaker volume wasn’t enough to wake me up. Also, while listening to music, you might feel that the volume is not as high as you want it to be. The sound is pretty good on this Windows Phone 7 goodie, but that does not mean there is no way of improving it. In fact, it is possible to increase the volume of this Samsung Windows Phone by a large factor. Of course, there are risks involved, but if you are really looking forward to a louder phone, or are just curious about how you can get a little bit more out of your Omnia 7, well, here’s how to do it. Read More

Making Audio Notes Made Easier With Sound Shaper For Windows Phone 7

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When it comes to app development, there are two ways to go about it. You can choose to add lots of glossy-looking, useless features hiding the real functionality of the app, or you can go for simplicity and create a task-dedicated app with an uncluttered interface. Experience has shown that from among the two categories just highlighted, the second one is usually more popular with the users. Sound Shaper is one such simple app which has been developed for Windows Phone 7 users and focuses on just one task, i.e. recording sounds with one touch! Read More

Stream Audio From One Sound Card Or Device To Another With Playthrough

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When editing audio or recording music by taking input sound from musical instruments, it is required to route sound from one sound device to another. To perform these functions, normally a paid software suite is used, however, one can also use a number of free tools in conjunction to overcome this problem. Playthrough is an open source and portable application which routes an incoming audio stream to the output of another soundcard. Usually you can only enable playback on the same soundcard, however, Playthrough can help you route playback sound to another sound card, which can be further used with the help of audio recording software to capture audio streams. Read More