Justin Maskus
Christian Brothers University SID/CoSIDA Computer Committee
Click Effects. It’s a great program for any athletic department that allows an
SID/public address announcer to have thousands of music files just a click
away. It allowed SID’s to rid themselves of CD’s and never have to search
through a disk to find that perfect sound effect or walkup music for each
situation.
The problem with Click Effects or Game Ops Commander, another similar program,
is they both tend to cost thousands of dollars with much of the cost going
toward the purchase of a laptop which they may require. Game Ops will allow
you to purchase just the software and Click Effects is going in that
direction, as well, but the cost for Game Ops by itself is anywhere between
$1,199 and $1,999.
Some smaller offices may want that type of technology, but may not have the
finances available to purchase either of the above programs. There is an
alternative. While talking to some colleagues, I was told about a program
called Sports Sounds Pro. It can be found at www.sportssoundspro.com. Sports
Sounds is a Window’s only program and is relatively similar to Click Effects
but the cost for the software is just $125. It has all of the capabilities of
higher-priced products, with the main exception being it will not come with
music files, whether it is sound effects or songs, pre-installed.
This, for most people, and I’m one of them, is a workable trade-off. Most
SID’s have CD’s lying around and we even have MP3’s already on our computers.
If you have either of those, all you have to do is import the music into the
program, and you have a full-featured music playback program that will rival
Click Effects or any program of that nature for a fraction of the cost of its
competitors.
On Sports Sounds’ Web site, they offer up many suggestions and other sites to
improve your usage of the program. They list places you can go to download
free music clips and even list sites that will give advice on how to better
use the product.
Some features of the program include:
-- 3,456 Sound buttons
-- Easy to use and friendly user interface
-- Two styles of sound level meters (Panel or Bar)
-- Output device selection (for those with multiple sound cards)
-- User configuration options like colors, sample rate, output device
selection
-- Volume Control
-- Plays all mp3, mp2, mp1, ogg, wav, and wma files
-- Any of the 72 pages can be made a Playlist
-- Faders (Fade In, Fade Out, and Cross-Fade)
-- Faders can be automatic or manual
-- Faders can optionally work on Hot Keys
-- Adjustable Fade Rates
-- Adjustable Fade begin positions for automatic fades
-- Locate sounds easily with the FIND feature
-- Copy, Cut, and Paste for Sound Buttons
-- Copy, Cut, and Paste for Pages
-- Sound Buttons can be dragged and dropped
-- Pages can be dragged and dropped
-- Game Clock and separate Timer
-- Automatic Timed Start capability
-- Ability to start and move around anywhere within a sound file
-- The ability to populate multiple sound buttons from multiple files
-- "Voice Over" Button
-- Multi-Play (up to five different sounds)
-- Full Screen display (re-sizeable)
-- Life time upgrades
To complement Sports Sounds, I recommend using Apple’s iTunes product. iTunes
is not only an MP3 player, but it is also a great way to get music from your
CD’s to your computer. Once you put a CD into your computer, iTunes will start
up and show all of the tracks available on the disk. If you have an active
internet connection, it will also download the track names to your computer.
Moving the songs from the disk to your computer is only one click away. iTunes
will even catalog the music for you into different folders sorted by the
artist’s name.
One thing you will need to do is to go into the preferences and
change the importing option from Apple’s default AAC encoder to an MP3
encoder. This will put the music in a usable format for Sports Sounds.
iTunes also serves as a way to get music you don’t already have. iTunes Music
Store provides you with a place to go to download your music. It is a
pay-based service and for .99 cents a song, you can search their database and
download whatever you need. They will also allow you to download an entire CD
for $9.99.
A final useful tool would be an MP3 editor. This you can use to cut songs down
in time or delete long intros of a song to get directly to the point you wish.
The product I use is Sony’s Sound Forge. It has an easy interface that allows
you to take your mouse, block out the part of the song you don’t want and
simply hit delete. You can download a sample version of the product for 30
days, but will have to pay to continue to use it. The cost of the product is
$400, and I am lucky that an athlete already had a full version they allowed
me to use. There are other MP3 editors out there and Sports Sound’s Web site
mentions a few of them.
Once you get the essential software, you can load your music in and have a
true music playback program that will rival Click Effects and liven up any
event you use it for.