ToneGen

Audio effects are a major type of resource in most multimedia items, and it doesn’t necessarily involve a lot of effort or complex programs to generate them. Just to save you the effort of obtaining sound via a microphone, ToneGen comes as an application which can generate tones for you and save them to file.

A cool thing about it is portability. On the one hand, it makes it possible to have it launched from the moment download is done, or even saved on a thumb drive in case you want to use it on other computers than your own. On the other hand, the health status of the target PC is not put at risk, because registry entries remain intact.

Since the application is dedicated to audio, visuals are not really something to make it stand out from the crowd. The set of features is wrapped around a classic window frame, with most functions in plain sight. Overall, the design is pretty intuitive, although you might have a little trouble figuring out what frequencies to use.

Most values are filled in by default, such as sample rate, length, and volume. There are also balance sliders for each tone, as well as volume levels, since you can generate up to three tones simultaneously. Leaving the frequency field blank means no tone is generated with that slot.

You can easily change the overall sample rate from a drop-down menu. Length is also modifiable, but pay attention, because time is represented in milliseconds. Frequency also needs to be manually written down in at least one dedicated field. There’s a preview function, as well as the possibility to save the generated tone as a WAV file.

Taking everything into consideration, we can state that ToneGen might not offer a great deal of features, making it a little counterintuitive since you need to constantly preview tones. However, there is some flexibility because you can manually add up to three frequencies for tones.