Spent some time having a playing with basic sounds on the Raspberry Pi this weekend. This is the first time I have done anything with audio since very early in the ‘life of pi’ when audio was somewhat temperamental. I am pleased to say it it was a much happier process this time around. Not wanting anything complicated I initially used some basic instructions from ‘Make:’ – http://makezine.com/projects/make-33/simple-soundboard/  . Which worked fine but Pygame seems to be a little fussy with which  ‘.wav’ files it will and will not accept, so I ended up using “os.system (aplay……)” which seems much more tolerant.

Just as a demo I linked in with last weeks post on PIR detectors, to play a flushing toilet effect every time someone walks into our home office – I suspect my wife will demand it’s prompt removal tomorrow morning ….

Worth mentioning to amplify the RPi’s output I am using a simple audio amp kit I purchased a while ago from Bitsbox – http://www.bitsbox.co.uk/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=280_283&products_id=2020 . 

The amp was very quick to build and worked first time which is always a bonus. This work is part of an updated RSS reader project I am currently working on.