What is Kaboom! 3.0?

Wild and wacky sounds for your personal computer. Kaboom! adds sounds to various actions on your Macintosh, such as emptying the trash, ejecting a disk, or chiming at the top and bottom of the hour.  Kaboom! Factory allows you to create and edit sounds.  This CD version contains over 1000 top quality sounds (including 8-bit and 16-bit versions).  By default, it installs 152 sounds.

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There's an old adage that says it’s OK to talk to yourself as long as you don’t answer back. Fortunately, Kaboom 3.0 talks back for you. Kaboom lets you assign sounds to Mac events (like shutting down or emptying the Trash) at hourly intervals or with a keystroke. Kaboom comes with 154 sounds — ranging from honking horns, to a squawking parrot, to crying babies, to Lucille Ball saying, “Oh now, Ricky!” Earlier Kaboom versions consisted of a commercial version of shareware called SoundMaster ($15), by Bruce Tomlin, plus a set of sounds. Nova Development says Kaboom 3.0 has been rewritten and supports more events, longer sounds, and sound sets, and has better memory management plus a new sound editor.

The new Kaboom control panel organizes events into categories such as General, Disks, and PowerBook. The PowerBook events are possibly the most useful: you can make Kaboom beep when your battery needs charging or when you remove the power cord from your PowerBook.

The sounds included with Kaboom range in both type and tastefulness; personally, I would not configure Kaboom to sound a pistol shot at start-up or a prostitute saying, “Come here, cutie, hey” when my Macintosh needs a disk. Fortunately, you can configure Kaboom easily and delete the files that you don’t want. Kaboom accepts most sound formats (System 7 SND resources, AIFF, Macintosh sound files, and sound suitcases), so you can use your own sounds as well.

You can also adjust the frequency and volume at which a sound plays, and you can play random sounds at specified events. Sound sets let you create groups of sounds; perhaps a calming set for the adult in your house, and a set of belches, screeching chimps, and Really Gross Spit for teenagers. You can stop a sound in the middle of playback by pressing the escape key.

You launch the sound-editing application, Kaboom Factory, either at the Finder or by clicking on Edit in the Kaboom control panel. Within Factory, you can add sound effects and copy and paste between sound files. The files can get fairly large, but Kaboom has a compression option in its Save As dialog box that reduces file sizes by three times or six rimes. When editing a sound in Kaboom Factory, you can select a portion of the sound just as you would select a word in a word processor. You can apply effects like Amplify, Reverb, and Echo to a particular sound or part of a sound. Kaboom Factory also lets you change the scale, volume, and pitch of a sound. It’s a fun, well-designed tool for novice sound editors.

The Last Word With a street price of about $35, Kaboom costs more than twice as much as SoundMaster, but the latter doesn’t come with sounds or a sound editor. Kaboom’s upbeat and clearly written manual is also an asset. Kaboom is a fun program for anyone who wants a little company while computing.

Pearlstein, Joanna. (February 1995). Kaboom 3.0. Macworld. (pg. 89).

Download Kaboom! 3.0 for Mac

Architecture

Motorola 68K

Compatibility notes

The documentation says this is for Macintosh System Software 6.0.7 and above.  I have tested it on SheepShaver under Mac OS 9.0.4, and Basilisk II under System 7.5.3.  Not all actions trigger sounds under Mac OS 9.0.4.  I also noticed that the shutdown sound hangs both SheepShaver and Basilisk II during shutdown.  Disabling the shutdown sound in the Kaboom! Control Panel solves this issue.

Emulating this? It could probably run under: SheepShaver