How to play an audio file from a keyboard shortcut?

Diego22 wrote on 3/23/2004, 3:21 AM
There was an effect in the movie "Ferris Buehller's Day Off" I would like to imitate. He rigged a computer to play sounds in real time. I want to be able to make a simple keystroke or keyboard shortcut and play one of a number .wav files, for instant sound effects (to be played during a live performance that I am helping produce and record).

Does anyone know how to achieve this effect?
thanks in advance! -Diego

Comments

Rednroll wrote on 3/23/2004, 6:38 AM
You can do this in Vegas except it might take two key strokes. What you really want is probably something more like a sampler program like Giga Studio. In Vegas, you can space your audio clips along the time line. Hit the "m" key and this will drop a marker with a number. By pressing that number the Vegas cursor will jump to that location. For your instance You can start to play the first clip, by hitting the spacebar. Then make sure there is plenty of space between each clip, so that you don't accidentally run them together. But now with Vegas in the play mode by pressing the number keys 1-9, it will jump to that marker position and start to play that audio clip. The spacebar is Play/stop, and also can be changed to play/pause in the preferences menu if that might work better for you.
pwppch wrote on 3/23/2004, 8:19 AM
Sound Forge can do this.

You could do this in ACID using the DLS synth.

You would have to create a sound bank file to load into the dls synth. Awave does this pretty well, but it is not trivial.


There are also many freeware/shareware VSTi samplers out there that cand be hooked up into ACID. Many let you simply load a wave file and assign it to a key. Depending on the VSTi, you could then trigger from a GUI keyboard that it provides, use one of the many virtual keyboards, or connect to an external MIDI keyboard.

Peter
Rednroll wrote on 3/23/2004, 8:38 AM
"Sound Forge can do this."

How do you do this in Sound Forge? That was my original thought, this would be a nice feature for Sound Forge, either through the Playlist, or region list, but I couldn't figure out a way to do the PC keyboard to play them back.
pwppch wrote on 3/23/2004, 10:09 AM
PC keyboard : Missed that requirement. I could get that to happen either. I will ask the Forge gurus here as I thought one could map the keyboard to the virtual MIDI keyboard.

Peter