Little Soundie Audio Player Hookup Guide

Contributors: LightningHawk

Audio Files

You can trigger about 20 files (2-3 seconds sound bites each) from the SPI flash storage (USB mass storage). The total SPI flash size is 4 megabits (Mb) (approximately a .5 megabyte (MB)). OGG files take up much less space than .WAV so I recommend using OGG if more then 5-6 sound bites are to be used.

Ogg Vorbis is an audio file format developed by xiph, an open source multi-media company.

Ogg Vorbis is a fully open, non-proprietary, patent-and-royalty-free, general-purpose compressed audio format for mid to high quality (8kHz-48.0kHz, 16+ bit, polyphonic) audio and music at fixed and variable bitrates from 16 to 128 kbps/channel. This places Vorbis in the same competitive class as audio representations such as MPEG-4 (AAC), and similar to, but higher performance than MPEG-1/2 audio layer 3, MPEG-4 audio (TwinVQ), WMA and PAC.

There are sites out there that will do the conversion for you without having to open a program, like this one.

Audacity is a great open source resource for all things audio that also has fantastic documentation.

There are several sound effects sites such as Zapsplat and Soundbible. You can grab license-free sound bites from these locations and then convert to .OGG or .WAV using the methods listed above.

Binary Coded Playback

To get the most out of your device and trigger more sounds than there are available pins, the firmware is set up to trigger pins based on a binary code. The binary associates an audio file with a specific set of pins held either high or low. While the pin combinations on Little Soundie can trigger up to 64 files, it is likely you will only be able to fit about 20 .OGG files on the device. In the binary column below, the number represents which pins on the Little Soundie are pulled high and which pins are held low. Pin 04 is the first digit and pin 00 is the last. Pin 05 is there in case you want to reprogram the VS1000D to change the playback functions.