When the author's son started playing high school baseball. The author started searching for a means to add excitement through sound effects to the games. When he attended a local baseball game at a rival school, the announcer there was doing timely sound effects. The author asked him how he was able to produce these sounds and was informed that the announcer was using a laptop computer and a program call "PCDJ". That program (PCDJ)was written by a college student (now a graduate) named Daniel Lewis. The program was shareware and reasonably priced. The author purchased a copy of the program and used it successfully for a couple of years. The sound effects produced caught the attention of others and several high school announcers inquired about the product. Unfortunately "PCDJ" was sold by Mr. Lewis to another company. They were only after the name and they placed the "PCDJ" name on their own product. Their product is excellent but it is oriented towards Professional Disc Jockey use with elaborate mixing capabilities. It is no longer a quick and simple sound machine for sports competition. The author searched for another source and found a couple of commercial programs used by various professional major league teams and professional organizations. Both products, while excellent, were also quite expensive (around $10,000 or more) but they offered existing sound libraries, enhanced sound cards, and were able to handle video output for jumbo-trons (the large video display screens you see at major league ballparks and stadiums). Some of the commercial products also had stripped down versions for school usage but even then they were still quite pricey. The author, who is a professional programmer, decided to write his own version of the software and make it available to High School organizations, Little Leagues, Babe Ruth Leagues, etc. The program is written in a language called Delphi. The original version of "PCDJ" served as the template for Sports Sounds. The main display screen of Sports Sounds is very similar to the display screen in "PCDJ". The author was able to use his own experience in doing sound effects at baseball games at the Babe Ruth, High School, and College level to incorporate several new features that he found helpful. Among them are play lists, multiple groups of pages, right mouse click popup menus for adding and editing, and drag and drop capability for button organization. For the first year of its life, Sports Sounds was Freeware. As the user community grew and the requests for additional functionality were received along with the increased need for user support, the next generation of Sports Sounds emerged with a very affordable price. In 2003, Sports Sounds changed its name to Sports Sound Pro. The author was never able to acquire the domain name SportsSounds.com but was able to acquire the domain name SportsSoundsPro.com. Also a major upgrade to the program was released. There are commercial products, both hardware and software, that functionally do what Sports Sounds Pro does and they range in cost from around $3,000 to $10,000.
