Papa Soundie Audio Player Hookup Guide

Contributors: LightningHawk

Audio Files

You can trigger up to 32 files from the SD card. With the extra space on the SD card you use much larger files than on the Little Soundie. For the Papa Soundie to keep track of the audio files they need to be named in a particular way; in a 7.3 format. Of the 7, the first five characters are reserved for the name of file and the last two characters are reserved for the file number. This is how the hardware knows which pin triggers which file. The .3 refers to the file extension, which can be either .ogg or .wav. For instance: file 1 could be AUDIO00.ogg or FILES00.wav. File 32 could be something like CLAPS31.ogg File one will be triggered when D2 is held high.

What is OGG Vorbis?

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 Zapsplat and Soundbible to grab license free sound bites from and then convert to .OGG or .WAV using the methods listed above.

Binary Coded Playback

To get the most of your device and trigger more sounds than available pins the firmware is set up to trigger pins based on a binary code to associate an audio file with a specific set of pins. On the Papa Soundie you can trigger 32 files. Under the Binary column below the number represents which pins on the Arduino are pulled high and low from D6 to D2.