- "Sound Recorder" redirects here. For the sound recorder used in version 1.4, see Sound Recorder (1.4).
The Sound Editor is a feature in Scratch. It follows up on the basic sound recording utility in Scratch 1.x, and allows for basic sound editing features, including fades in and out, cropping, and reversing for all of or a small selected portion of a sound. It also allows MP3s and WAVs to be imported, which overwrites the previously recorded sound. This can be useful for simple editing of an MP3 or a WAV without other programs.
Contents
Menus
Edit
The "edit" menu contains tools to edit the sound. It has: undo, redo; cut, copy, paste; delete, select all. Undo will undo the most recent action; redo will redo it if it was undone. Cut, copy, and paste work with Scratch's own sound clipboard; it does not copy to the system's clipboard, nor can it paste in external sounds. Delete deletes the selected sound fragment. Select all selects the entire soundtrack. Individual sections can be selected by dragging the mouse over them.
All of the items, with the exception of delete, have a letter next to them (as seen in the screenshot to the right). This is a keyboard shortcut. To activate it, press shift+letter. This is in contrast to the usual manner of using ctrl/cmd for keyboard shortcuts.
 Note: | There used to be shortcuts for each function in the "edit" menu, but they were removed. They weren't fully functional and developed before their removal. |
Effects
The "effects" menu is where modifications actually happen. It has: fade in, fade out; louder, softer, silence; reverse. Fade in makes it start out quiet and gain in volume, while fade out does the opposite. Louder and softer modify the sound level of the selection accordingly. Silence silences the selection. Reverse will play the selection from back to front, often resulting in nonsensical sounds.
Cropping
There are a couple of options for cropping sounds. One can highlight a section of the sound and click the delete or backspace key to remove that section. However, if one wants to keep an individual section but remove the rest of the sound, they can highlight the section they want to keep and hit shift-backspace or shift-delete to crop the image to solely the highlighted section.
Converting a Sound to MP3 Format in iTunes
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This description is accurately relevant to the most recent version of iTunes, which can be downloaded here.
Sounds can be converted into MP3 format using iTunes, an external program created by Apple Inc. However, the song must be downloaded to one's computer in order for it to be convertible, meaning that it can not be a song that is stored in iCloud and streamed. Before converting the sound to MP3, your preferences must be set to convert imported sounds to MP3 format. This can be done by accessing Edit > Preferences > Import settings and selecting MP3 Encoder on the Import Using drop-down.
Then, on iTunes, in the "Songs" tab, select the desired song by clicking on it, and it will become highlighted (you can select the song from any tab, such as "Songs" or "Albums").
Then, after the song is selected, you must right-click the song and click Create MP3 Version. The song will be duplicated; you will now have both the original and the new MP3 version. From here, the MP3 copy can be imported into the Scratch Sound Editor.
Example Uses
The sound editor can be used in some of the following ways:
- Getting all sounds in a project to a uniform volume
- Creating effects
- Censoring inappropriate language in a song
- Make the sound clip sound more amusing (such as combining sounds or reversing the audio)
- Converting audio formats (such as MP3) to the WAV format
