You've spent hours crafting your Flash masterpiece - the animations are hot, the transitions are smooth, and the text effects are beautiful enough to make your dog cry. So why does it seem a little lackluster? Easy - it's too quiet! You need sound to liven up that presentation.

"But I'm a programmer - not a musician or a recording engineer" you say. Well, that might have been a good excuse a few years ago, but not today. The tools to make and edit music and sound on your computer have gotten much easier, much more powerful and frankly, just plain fun. And if you don't have the time, skills or inclination to do it yourself, there's tons of sites where you can get free (and legal!) sound clips that you can use.

Let's start by finding out how you can make your own quality sound effects and music for use in your Flash and Web development projects. In the next installment of this series, we'll take a look at where to get free sound clips, and how to edit the sounds to your liking.

This isn't intended to be a comprehensive list of all the audio and music software in the world - there's not enough room for that here, and frankly, it takes whole sites to keep up with all of the developments in that field! (Jump to the end of the article for links to some of these music software sites). The goal is to give you a list of some of the easiest, most interesting, most versatile and least expensive PC audio software available for download today. Grab a couple of these programs and you'll be thumping, beeping and blooping on your site with the best of them. Did I mention that they were cheap too? Many of these programs are either free or shareware. Make sure you register your shareware - application programmers have to eat too!

First up, sound effects:

Hits, Stabs, Clicks and Pads

You can break most sound effects into two groups, short percussive noises (sometimes called hits or stabs), and longer sustained sounds (sometimes called pads). Hits are good for rollovers, button clicks, comical "splat" noises, and the like. Think of them as the audio version of exclamation points and periods - they emphasize a point in an animation, give the user instant feedback to an action, or let them know when a task has been completed. Pads are, as the name implies, generally a "bed" of sound - this could range from a soft electronic drone, to cricket or water sounds looping in the background (you can certainly use music samples as a type of bed, but let's put that option aside until later). You might use pads to set an overall mood, or to distract..er.."entertain" the user during loading breaks or transitions.

Enter the Soft Synth

To make these sounds from scratch, you need to become a sound designer. Now, that's not nearly as hard as it sounds. Once upon a time, you'd need a room full of synthesizers and recording gear. Now, all you need to do is fire up a soft synth (short for software synthesizer) on your computer and start twiddling parameters until to find something that catches your ear. That's not to say there's no skill involved in using these tools - no one's going to sit down and immediately have a timeless masterpiece come out. But the sounds that you can get out of these puppies without much effort is pretty darn impressive! They're great tools, for casual hobbiests and serious musicians/sound designers alike.