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Hey I've never made a request on here before.... but I am an indie game maker making my very first game & i'm hoping to find a free sound i would describe like this:

one single solitary beep sound that sounds kinda threatening scary like you just activated something that is definitely very not good. something the players response might be oh oh... just from this sound

maybe its simple to make, if you hook me up with a sound & i like it to use it i will put your name in the game credits for "audio assist"

i wish i could make sounds myself cause i can imagine this sound in my head, but am just a visual artist... when it comes to making sounds i have very limited tricks in my repertoire.

Searching for beep with max duration of 1 second shows 275 results, some of which are:

http://www.freesound.org/people/HardPCM/sounds/35714/
http://www.freesound.org/people/hello_flowers/sounds/27427/
http://www.freesound.org/people/Corsica_S/sounds/15411/
http://www.freesound.org/people/robstrobe/sounds/9070/
http://www.freesound.org/people/metamorphmuses/sounds/35176/
http://www.freesound.org/people/HardPCM/packs/2064/

Are any of these any close to the one you imagine? If not, how different?
Maybe low pitch, some distortion, extreme vibrato (both in frequency and depth), dissonant bitonal, can help conveying that "bad thing" feeling.

I had to limit the number of example links to stay under the spam limits, but more sounds from some of those users may apply; if you have time, check those users or the full search result.

thanks for the reply! i'll check those out soon! i'm just leaving on a little vacation so don't have time at the moment to check 'em out. i wasn't aware there was more advanced search options here, i was just trying to find this by keyword without success. i'll take a better look around later....

vibrato eh and dissonent bitonal? i'll look up how thats done, how to place those effects you mention on a sound, maybe i can learn something new here... how to make it myself. now that i know the terminology (i just learned basic mixing and blending sounds from online tutorials and stuff)

best way to help a man who asks for fish is to to teach him how to fish right? thanks

Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/) can be a good start for sound processing; it's free, available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS/X. It comes with good built-in effects, but it also supports external plugins.

One of the added plugins I've found is a Vibrato effect, basically it alters the pitch of your sound from below to above the original pitch, and you can choose the depth of the alteration; so, you can pick an amount where the resulting upper and lower tone won't belong to the same harmonic scale, hence, dissonant (at least for untrained ears never exposed to the whole load of different scales used around the world )

Happy fishing!

thanks copyc4t! i've been using audacity for my basic sound editing needs, im gonna go look up that vibrato plugin to play with

Welcome
The exact plugin I referred to is the TAP Vibrato, part of a plugin pack you can find here but they are Unix/Linux only.
In case you're on Windows or MacOS/X, just searching for vibrato vst will show quite a bunch of free ones.

im on mac and tried getting some plugins going. after playing around a bit, i got a "vibrato" plugin to show up in the "effect" menu but when i select it nothing happens at all. maybe this particular plugin is broken?

i'm sure i'd use plugins lots if i could get them working, i see lots of cool free ones about... any tips to get started properly? i've never installed a working plugin to audacity so not sure what i'm doing wrong.

Most probably, the frequency is preset to 0Hz, that means no vibrato; try altering the parameters, the Preview key should help you finding sensible settings before applying them.

should i be using .ny plugins? i don't get any options or window popup, just click the new plugin choice appearing in menu (at least i got something to appear there ) .....but nothing happens... no preview or any selections possible that i see.

i downloaded the vst enabler trying to get vst plugins working... but reading the audacity wiki it sounds like it needs some sdk which i can't find. not sure what the best route is to get working with audacity plugins for a mac user.

aha! edited to add... i noticed when i choose "nyquist prompt" i also get nothing at all going on, the prompt window doesn't appear. all my other default effects work, just not the prompt or any plugins..... so I am thinking my install of audacity is wrong or something like that. any idea what to correct?

Unluckily I have less than zero experience with macs

As for plugin options, Nyquist should work as they're scripts; I don't see any vibrato here but there are quite a few goodies you might find useful. Besides, someone with knowledge in the field could write one.

Other than that, there's a mac port of a good collection of LADSPA plugins mentioned on this page

As for the vst enabler, I see it's only needed for the stable version 1.2, the current beta 1.3 doesn't need it; so try getting it from the page mentioned above, maybe it will work.

cool! thank you for that copyc4t. LADSPA plugins work no problem here yay so now I got a full kit of plugins to play with... maybe one of these plugins even contains the vibrato/tremolo effects, if not I'm sure there is one somewhere around the net i can use.

lots of fun stuff to check out now anyway, for me LADSPA was definitely the way to go

No problem, have fun experimenting

That collection IIRC lacks a vibrato, so if for this particular case you want to hear what it's like, I can post you some example. Consider of course it was just one idea to try giving the "bad" effect, but not necessarily the most proper one

By the way, despite the scary "beta", I've been using 1.3 for quite a while without problems on Linux; I hope it serves you as well.

turns out my plugin troubles was all just stemming from a bad install.

i reinstalled audacity and now can easily use all plugins (including vibrato) so much cool stuff here thanks again

Well done, now it's fishing time!

hey i'm just digging up this old thread to say thanks again! The game is all done now! your plugin advise totally helped me start pulling the sound editing together and so as promised I put you in the game credit. You can see that on the website (http://robocatrampage.com/about.html) or within the game.

Well done!!!!
The game pages look really cool (no I'm not being biased about cats!) and should serve as a good appetizer

Congratulations and thanks to you both! I'm honoured, and glad I could help somehow

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