LabChirp

Multimedia would not be the same thing without sound effects populating and accompanying every movement, frame, or action. These can easily be created on a computer with the right applications, and there are plenty to choose from. Among others, LabChirp gives you the possibility to create an infinity of different sound effects for multiple purposes.

The application comes with many advantages, but the the first you get to experience is the lack of an installer, which means you can leave it on an USB flash drive and work on your projects on other computers as well. As a consequence, system registries remain intact, thus keeping your PC clean.

Truth be told, there’s hardly a feature that can’t be called an advantage. However, you need to give it a little time and experiment with a few settings until you get the hang of it. This doesn’t mean accommodation is difficult, but working with sound isn’t the same as editing pictures, and a lot more attention and time are required.

Fortunately, everything you get to work with is found in the main window, with only a few extra elements bringing up different windows. Various sliders let you adjust effects, and some drop-down menus are used to select type. Moreover, editing can easily be done by setting points on a frequency modulation amplitude envelope, with results shown in waveform as they’re generated.

What gives this application a great deal of flexibility is the number of tracks that can be activated at the same time. Combining up to 8 different channels, each with individual effects can result in an unlimited number of effect possibilities. These can be saved, and there are even various presets you can load for faster accommodation.

You can go to great lengths in your attempt to create sound effects. Customization is abundant, and although you may feel limited by the number of available sliders, you can individually draw pattern for frequency and amplitude in modulation, as well as general frequency. Moreover, Waveform can be set to different types, with customizable value.

Quality can be customized, with options to select various bit rates, dither, and oversampling. To save, you simply trigger the function and generate a new WAV file on your computer. Length is manually changed, with the extra option to add delay effect in seconds.

Taking everything into consideration, we can say that LabChirp might not make much of a first impression at first, but this radically changes once you put your headphones on and start changing a few sliders. Although not abundant in number of items, customization in an important feature, especially given the amount of channels you can combine.