You can use pre-recorded digital music and sound effects. This method offers high-quality audio at low cost, but it limits your ability to tailor the content to your application. Your goal is to acquire or record all the necessary voices, sound effects, and music. After you've collected all the pieces, you can then prepare them for use in the application. You can collect the different audio elements in two ways:
You can use pre-recorded digital music and sound effects. This method offers high-quality audio at low cost, but it limits your ability to tailor the content to your application.
You can create and record the audio yourself. This lets you control the music and sound effects, however, you also have to invest in specialized equipment and professional staff. You'll need to hire professional audio engineers, or contract with recording studios, to do the job properly.
To record using the WaveEdit application included in Windows with Multimedia, load and run WaveEdit. You can record in several formats and perform simple edits on the final waveform. The file can then be saved in the Microsoft Waveform format. To record using another recording system, you'll need to run the recording application and set the recording rate. You'll end up with a waveform that you can edit and mix with other sound.
One of the best ways to ensure a clean, distortion-free signal is to record the sound directly from the source.
Caution:
Don't forget that you are breaking the law if you record and use copyrighted material, without securing the rights from the publisher.
One of the nastier elements of digital recording is a distortion, called “clipping,” that occurs at loud segments (high amplitudes) of the music. It happens when you record with too much volume, or when you digitize an analog source outside the tolerable range (analog electronics tolerate this sort of distortion much better than digital electronics). Several recording applications display the clipped region when the amplitude of the source waveform is too high. Other products show gauges or waveforms going off the scale or outside the display region. Pay attention to these signs and reduce the amplitude of your sounds as necessary.
It is best to record your sounds at the highest possible sampling rate to preserve the maximum information, the highest quality being either 48 kHz or 44.1 kHz samples at 16 bits per sample. Sounds stored in this format are generally referred to as linear PCM (Pulse Code Modulation) files. PCM files are basically uncompressed, raw sound data.