Creating sound effects - inexpensively

[joeranger]

My inspiration for this thread is to add a button to my Jaws barrel which when pushed, plays the theme from jaws.
http://therpf.com/showthread.php?t=49614
The technology to do this has to be simple since greeting cards now come with sound.
Radio shack has mini recorders, but the playback is pretty bad.

What are the other options to add push button sound to a prop?

 

[Raffles]

I got a 20 second reuseable sound recorder from the pound shop. I use it in parallel to do the static burst on my TK helmet.

 

[dropshipbob]

OT: Hey Joe! I just started a thread over on the Aliens forum wondering where you are, and here you are!

 

[exoray]

The problem is you need to balance "inexpensively" with sound quality...

Yes the technology is there and yes it can be cheap, but cheap usually comes with a compromise of sound quality or function...

The best high quality option on the cheap is to pick up one of the cheap small sized mp3 players that can be had for about $20 and kit bash the buttons to something you can use and use a set of battery powered desk speakers...

Just hit up Ebay for 128 mb or 256 mb mp3 players they should be easily obtainable for under $20

Short of that the cheapy sound modules are OK but they do sound toy or greeting card like...

 

[Raffles]

I actually took the audio input wires off the supplied mike and attached a mike jack to them. Connected to the audio out port on my laptop and recorded mp3 quality sounds.