Drury:

I love collecting and distributing wacky sound effects, and the Sound of the Month Club has never faltered since the very beginning of Archipelago. But they are rather troublesome to deal with.

The central problem is that they take up a LOT of disk space. I could devise a system which automatically transferred all monthly sound effects into a central archive on each member's hard disk, but most members just don't have the room. My collection currently weighs in at around fifteen MEGABYTES, which makes it three times bigger than all the voice volumes put together. And if all the sounds are put into a single stack, the stack quickly becomes too big to drag onto a diskette. You would then be forced to use a resource mover to sort them into many small stacks. I've actually been doing this, but it's rather time consuming.

My current compromise is to simply ship out a separate stack with each issue and leave the rest up to you guys. At least these stacks can be filed on diskettes. If you ever wish to transfer a sound from one stack to another, just hilite the sound and push the Install button. If you hold down the option key when pushing the Install button, a special resource mover will appear. This gadget works much like the Font/DA Mover. Incidentally, in order to make the sounds appear on the sound list you need to update it by clicking on the jukebox.

The reason the Sound Archive button on the main screen carried you to a previous volume is that I forgot to update that button. Sorry 'bout that. The button now goes to the most recent Sound Club volume.

One of the items on my TO DO list is revamping the Sound Club Archive stacks. At the very least I can add buttons to link the different volumes together and to make Updating and Sorting automatic. Do you have any other suggestions? Can you think of a better system for distributing sounds?

As for your second question, yes there is indeed a way to let your system make noises as it goes about it's work. Paul and Robert and I have sounds aplenty on our systems. The problem is that there you may want to use more than one program simultaneously, these sounds make heavy demands on your RAM (You have 2 megs as I recall; but members with only 1 meg may as well forget it), and in order to use sounds with some of these programs, the sounds have to be in special formats.

This is where it gets REAL messy. There are probably at least a dozen different formats out there, some ancient, some just out, and all sorts of different conversion programs. The whole thing's a mess! In the past, in order to get some of the sounds Paul contributed into HyperCard format, I had to run the sounds through FOUR different conversion programs! The latest version of SoundMover reduces this problem, but it can still be unnerving to novices and experts alike.

But never fear! As soon as I finish this card I am going to contribute the simpler of the two major sound programs, a shareware init and cdev called Finder Sounds. Put these little guys in your system folder and restart your machine. You should start to hear all sorts of little noises whenever you pull down a menu, click on an icon, or empty the trash. You can control these effects by pulling out the control panel from your desk accessory menu and choosing FinderSounds from the scrolling list of icons. This program is not too hard on your memory and may satisfy your needs.

If not, just say the word, and next time I'll contribute another cdev called SoundMaster. This lets you do some things FinderSounds does not and you can assign your own sounds. Unfortunately, the sounds have to be in a non-HyperCard format, so you'll need a conversion program to use your Archipelago sounds. This one really chews up the memory, but Paul and I both love it.

I wish it wasn't quite so complicated. If you're really hungry for this kind of thing, give me a call and I'll walk you through it.