Review: 101 Big Sound Buttons
Score:
75%
This is going to seem an awfully trivial application review to start the week, but I should point out that 101 Big Sound Buttons is a lot, lot more than your typical (and infamous) fart application. I'm pretty sure such a sound is included here, but there are 98 others, covering a wide variety of 'uses'. And yes, that only makes 99 - the remaining two are missing in action! There's still plenty here for the sound effect board fan though.
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Who can resist browsing through a large palette of sound effect clips, trying them out? Given that bodily noises are (almost) entirely absent here, there's not the usual 'disgust' factor - which is good. As someone who runs a few podcasts, it's seriously tempting to use a few of the effects presented here at appropriate points: - a round of applause as Rafe makes a good point, perhaps? Or a manic laugh after one of Ewan's industry spanning theories?
What we have here are eleven screens of nine icons, each with its own sound effect. Rather neatly, some are one off samples and others can be looped, i.e. you hold the button down for continuous effect (e.g. applause) - which is which is indicated, as you can see on the screenshots, with a little curved arrow annotation for the looped/repeatable ones. You swipe from page to page, iPhone-style, left and right, and Pico Brothers have even borrowed the iPhone's screen convention of patterns of dots to show where you are in the screen pantheon.
It all works rather brilliantly, I have to say. The inclusion of the looped effects is very clever and very well implemented. And I was impressed by how loud the effects were - it's fair to say that effort has been put into maximising the signal levels ('compressing') inside each clip, though of course the louder your phone's speaker the better - on the N8, 101 Big Sound Effects was alarmingly loud. The 'Big' bit in the title is well deserved.
On the negative side, there's no way to adjust the volume of the effects - there are no controls in the app and the device volume controls are ignored. Ah well.
I also had a few effect misfires when the touch detection proved a little too sensitive and an intended tap ended up being interpreted as a missed swipe and the effect wasn't played. Practice no doubt makes perfect, mind you.
Finally, the app is a little slow to start - possibly because it's built on Qt, possibly because it has to load a number of starting sound samples into RAM.
In summary though, we have a somewhat trivial application that has been done well enough that it might actually come in useful. Maybe you're putting on a pub event and want to interject some humour into your PAing? Maybe you're recording a podcast? Or maybe you want to simply make your colleagues wonder what the heck has been let loose in the office? Either way, 101 Big Sound Effects is free and well worth a download.
After all, you never know when you'll need to produce the sound of chains clanking, bees swarming or a lion roaring...
Steve Litchfield, All About Symbian, 12 June 2011
Reviewed by Steve Litchfield at