LabChirp 1.00

LapChirp is a powerful program which can synthesize sound effects for games, videos or whatever you like.

If you're an audio geek then you'll appreciate the features available here. You can set your effect modulation, shape its envelope, use standard waveforms or create your own, and support for up to eight channels means there's plenty of flexibility. Not bad for something with a 78.5KB download size.

But if all that means precisely nothing to you, no problem: just click Randomizer > Randomize! and LabChirp will instantly generate a brand new effect.

As you might expect, the average random effect is entirely useless. By just clicking Randomize! repeatedly, though, we quickly managed to produce effects with all kinds of creative possibilities. And if nothing else they're a good way to learn more about the program's abilities, as once you've created something which sounds reasonable, you're then able to tweak it via the other controls to produce a sound more precisely suited to your needs.

When you're finally happy, though, you might discover what appears to be a rather serious problem: there's no apparent way to export your sound effect to a usable format. Clicking File > Save As only provides an option to save effects in LabChirp's own LCH format, and there's no Export tool which supports anything else.

Don't worry, though, this isn't as bad as it seems. If you click File > Save As, it turns out that LabChirp doesn't just save an LCH file - you get a standard WAV file, too. The program really should make that more clear, but otherwise LabChirp is an interesting tool which provides a great deal of sound generating power.

LabChirp is a small but surprisingly capable sound effect generator. And while it can seem intimidating to audio beginners, the ability to generate random effects makes life much easier.