Abel uses digitised sound files in the standard Windows WAV format. One way you can make these is to use the Windows sound recorder. Alternatives are available commercially, or can be downloaded free from the internet (for example, Audacity).

Make sure you have good recordings: in particular, that they are not so loud that they overload the recording equipment. You may need to adjust recording levels or microphone placement.

Once the volume is right, you need to set the recording quality. For example, use "22,050Hz, 16 Bit, Mono". Abel sound samples should be mono, and any reasonable quality: 22KHz gives a tolerable trade-off between quality and file size.

After recording each bell, save the resulting file with a name like "bell1.wav" in the directory C:\Program Files\Abel 3\Bells.

The bell sound must start immediately in your recorded samples, or there will be a delay between Abel ringing the bell and the bell sounding. If you have a sound editor you can use this to delete any such periods of silence.

You will find it best to fade out each recording over 1.5 to 2.5 seconds. If you make it longer than this, the sound of many bells ringing will be "muddy".

You should also make the total length of the sound sample about 5 seconds, by having a period of silence after the bell has faded. If your sample isn't this long, you should pad it out with silence to 5 seconds or thereabouts (this is to avoid problems on some computers with bells occasionally failing to sound. See Troubleshooting for more information about this problem and how to deal with it, if it happens to you).

See also:

  Recording sounds for use by Abel
  The Bell Definition File