Wondering what you might do with SndSampler, "the ultimate Macintosh sound tool" (as noted author and television personality David Pogue has called it), now that you've paid your shareware fee like the dutiful, clear-conscienced netizen that you are? Take a listen to the following sound-only QuickTime movies.

First we have a nice little strummed acoustic guitar.

Now the same sound after processing by SndSampler. The gentle acoustic has become a PILE-DRIVING ELECTRIC BUZZSAW! (Careful--it's LOUD!)

Wanna know how we did it? Simple.

• Apply Hall Reverb with the default parameters.

• Apply the Eleven distortion effect, holding down the option key when making the menu selection. (This turns off the automatic filtering.)

• Amplify by 50%.

• Apply the Buzz distortion effect, again with the option key held down.

• Apply a 4th-order IIR Butterworth lowpass filter with a corner frequency of 6000 Hz.

 
What? That's not enough? Well, how about this: wouldn't it be cool to be able to smoothly transform a stereo sound into mono and then back again? Sure it would! Only how can you do it? Not to worry--with SndSampler it's easy! First, listen to the result (note that the effect is most noticeable with headphones):

Now here's what you do:

• Open the original stereo sound.

• Do a Dynamic Pan on Channel 1. Set the endpoint pan values all the way left and set a pan value of 0 (smack in the middle) at the center of the sound. Your Dynamic Pan dialog should look something like this:

• Click OK. What you've got now is a three-channel sound. Do a Dynamic Pan on Channel 3. This time set the endpoint pan values all the way right. Leave the center pan value where it was.

• Now you'll have a four-channel sound. To turn it back into a two-channel (stereo) sound, you will use the Mixdown function. First do a Mixdown with Channel 4 being mixed down to Channel 2, and the amplification set at 100%.

• Now you're back to a three-channel sound. This time do a Mixdown with Channel 3 being mixed down to Channel 1.

• All finished. Voila!

 
Hey--betcha didn't know SndSampler could make a waveform display as cool as this!

Look for "superimpose" in the manual for more details.

 
Wait! That's not all. Here's what registered user Glenn Pillsbury has been doing with SndSampler:

A professor I assist here at the university was doing a series of lectures on the music from O Brother Where Art Thou and spent a lot of time talking about the song "Man of Constant Sorrow." He wanted to illustrate how the movie makes different narrative points using different versions of the song, and he thought it would be cool to combine sections of two versions into one file for the students to hear.

Of course, we could have just jammed the two sections together and been done with it, but I knew SndSampler would let me merge the two sections and, by creating fades at the appropriate times in the original materials before the merge, create a smooth transition between the two versions. I'm continually amazed and impressed by the combination of simple elegance and power contained in SndSampler. My work would not be the same without it.