Look in the package

Look in the package
Mac Tip #183/16-Feb-2005

These days in Mac OS X the applications (software) are often ‘packages’. That means that you have the application itself and all its various support files all bound up together in one special folder, with its own icon.

Normally when you double click a folder it opens and you can see what’s inside, but if you double click an application package the software starts up.

An example of this is iMovie, which comes free with all Macs. Double click it and you’ll start up iMovie. Once using iMovie, you’ll find it has many nifty sound effects, such as Alarm, Bell Tower, Crickets or Hard Rain.

Quit iMovie and instead of double clicking the icon hold down the Control key and click once. You’ll see an option to ‘Show Package Contents’. Now you’ll see the contents of that special folder.

Open the Contents folder and then the Resources folder. Inside there open the Sound Effects folder. The folders inside there contain many MP3 sound files.

With a bit of know-how you can use these as your system beeps, as mentioned in Beep beep, MacTip #180/26-Jan-2005, though in a future Tip I’ll need to tell you where to put the files.

But first, you need to convert these sounds to the AIFF format. Use the information from Sound formats, Mac Tip #181/02-Feb-2005, to do that conversion.