Any way to convert System 7 sounds to .wav for Windows?

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basilisk2user
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Any way to convert System 7 sounds to .wav for Windows?

Post by basilisk2user »

I have some sounds stored in the Documents folder on my BII 7.5.3 system as sound clippings, from old programs like Kid Pix (the famous "kaboom" sound), and the camera click that you hear when taking a screenshot using Cmd-Shift-3. What I did was to copy them in ResEdit, paste them in Scrapbook and then drag them to the Documents folder where they became clippings. But I see no way to save them, or the alert sounds embedded in the System file (Sosumi, Quack, Wild Eep etc.), as playable audio files like .mids or .wavs, even within System 7 itself.

What I want to know is if it's possible to turn these sound resources into .wav or .mid or some other compatible cross-platform sound format (I believe you can also play .wav on current Mac OS). I don't know how the Quadra "bong" was extracted as a startup sound (from the BII download that includes it), but I want to be able to do this with other sounds too.
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24bit
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Re: Any way to convert System 7 sounds to .wav for Windows?

Post by 24bit »

Did you try Sound App already?
http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/soundapp
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adespoton
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Re: Any way to convert System 7 sounds to .wav for Windows?

Post by adespoton »

SoundApp is THE way to work with sounds on 68k Macs. Later versions will even handle MP3 audio (decode/encode). SoundApp 68k can convert to/from pretty much every audio format you'd have come across in 1994, including dual channel PCM audio in a WAV container and MACE encoded audio in a SND resource fork (likely the two formats you're dealing with here).
Jorpho
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Re: Any way to convert System 7 sounds to .wav for Windows?

Post by Jorpho »

Yup, Soundapp is the way to go. A remarkable little doodad.
basilisk2user wrote:the alert sounds embedded in the System file (Sosumi, Quack, Wild Eep etc.)
I'd be very surprised if those, at least, are not already available for download as .wav files in one corner of the Internet or another.
I don't know how the Quadra "bong" was extracted as a startup sound (from the BII download that includes it)
If I'm not mistaken, the startup sounds are embedded in the Mac BIOS ROM, and BII will create the .wav file automatically the first time it starts up. I'm also pretty sure there's at least one comprehensive library of startup sounds out there.
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adespoton
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Re: Any way to convert System 7 sounds to .wav for Windows?

Post by adespoton »

Jorpho wrote:Yup, Soundapp is the way to go. A remarkable little doodad.
basilisk2user wrote:the alert sounds embedded in the System file (Sosumi, Quack, Wild Eep etc.)
I'd be very surprised if those, at least, are not already available for download as .wav files in one corner of the Internet or another.
I don't know how the Quadra "bong" was extracted as a startup sound (from the BII download that includes it)
If I'm not mistaken, the startup sounds are embedded in the Mac BIOS ROM, and BII will create the .wav file automatically the first time it starts up. I'm also pretty sure there's at least one comprehensive library of startup sounds out there.
The startup sounds are indeed embedded in the Mac ROM file, and are straight PCM two-channel audio, meaning that no re-encoding is needed; they just have to be dropped into the right container file (wav or aiff). You can see these sounds by cracking open the ROM with a hex editor.
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Re: Any way to convert System 7 sounds to .wav for Windows?

Post by ClockWise »

Don't forget to upload the sounds somewhere if you convert them. Could be fun to have!
basilisk2user
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Re: Any way to convert System 7 sounds to .wav for Windows?

Post by basilisk2user »

Sorry for the delay in replying, but many thanks to ALL who recommended SoundApp, it's worked WONDERFULLY for extracting sounds from games and programs! I now have a growing .wav collection of everything from the iconic Kid Pix "Kaboom" to various shoot-em-up sound effects from Spectre Challenger. Much nostalgia abounds :)

One additional query, though, about a small subset of "non-standard" programs that appear to be more like interactive Flash movies than "applications" per se. Mouse Practice (the beginners' tutorial with the scuba diver), Macintosh Basics (with the office guy in the Apple sweater who, probably not out of coincidence, resembles Steve Jobs a little bit), and the old Global Village Fax/Modem Tour from Performas (which has a really cool-sounding, Afro-Caribbean kettle-drum theme song), seem to have been packaged with a program called "MacroMind Director," which I cannot find anywhere (and probably wouldn't know how to use anyway).

AFAIK, MacroMind bears no relation to Macromedia, the original developer of Flash that was later bought by Adobe. But, strangely enough, they do seem quite similar both in name and application specialty. So how can I get sounds out of these? Is there like a Flash decompiler for tutorials made with this old program? Neither SoundApp nor ResEdit work on the main executable, as the resources seem to be embedded in a collection of movie-like files in the program folder, none of which can be properly unpacked with ResEdit either. :???:

Does anyone know what exactly goes into a MacroMind "program" and how I can extract the resources?
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Re: Any way to convert System 7 sounds to .wav for Windows?

Post by emendelson »

This isn't a useful answer about resources, but may be interesting about history:

http://lingoworkshop.com/articles/history

It seems (so it says at the linked page) that MacroMind morphed into Macromedia.
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adespoton
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Re: Any way to convert System 7 sounds to .wav for Windows?

Post by adespoton »

Yes; MacroMind kinda sorta morphed into Macromedia, which used much of the logic and source code from the original Director project, started by some Apple engineers for live demos IIRC. The original product worked by using a script with in-line bundled resources (resources stored serially in the data fork). When Macromedia took over, they used the general concept, but changed the storage format (a number of times) and moved away from using Apple Resource formats, so that the player files would be multi-platform.

So the trick with the MacroMind Director player files is likely to grab the data stream and work out where the binary script starts and ends; you might find SND or AIF-style resources directly embedded. If not, your best bet is likely to run them through Mini vMac using SoundFlower to redirect the auido output to Audacity or the like, for real-time waveform recording.
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