Convert Audio Files to Applications

Hey guys, this is Mack Kids101 with a little video on an application I made for the Mac that converts any audio file to an executable or an application. So this app is called Song to EXE; you'll be able to download it in the description.

So let's go ahead and open it up, and here it is. Before we do anything, let's go into the options menu up here. You'll see there are three options right now: Loop Audio. Basically, if this is checked, it'll loop the audio after it plays it, so it keeps on going and going. That should be checked probably by default.

Show in Dock, let me explain to you what this does: If you have this checked, then the app will show up in your Dock like a normal app, and you'll be able to quit it, etc. But if you don't check Show in Dock, it won't show up in Force Quit or in the Command Tab menu or in the Dock, so it'll be much harder to quit and much harder to even know what's causing the sound to play.

So, Show in Dock is checked, so it'll just be a regular application. The Create Unix Executable option, we'll get into that in a second; that's really for computer nerds more than regular users. Right now, I'm going to leave the default settings and I'm going to encode the sound of glass shattering. So let's drag it in here. I'm going to name the application; I'll call it Glass Shatter.

All right, it creates Glass Shatter.app. Let's just double click it, and as you can tell, we have a little loop of glass breaking. Let's go ahead and say quit. So that's the default settings; it shows up in the dock, and you can right-click and quit, and it loops.

Now, if we disable Loop, let me just show you what will happen. Let me get rid of this, and I'll name another Glass Shatter. If we get rid of Loop, it'll run, and then once it's done playing, it'll quit. And then let's say we get rid of this; let me just show you how you kill it.

So, let's say we get rid of that but we do—I'm sorry, wrong file—so we got rid of the Show in Dock option. Now we'll call it Glass Shatter again. We'll run it; you can hear the sound, and I'm going to turn it down because it probably gets annoying, but you can hear the sound.

But you can't quit it; it doesn't show up anywhere, and you can't get rid of it. So the way to get rid of it is to open up your Applications, go to Utilities, then go to Activity Monitor and search Audio App. Okay, Audio App will be here; we click it, we click Quit Process, and we click Quit, and that'll quit it forcibly. So now it's not playing.

So that's pretty much the only way to get rid of it if you uncheck Show in Dock and you have Loop Audio checked. Now let's go over the Create Unix Executable. You need Xcode in order for this to work. So for most of you, for most of our viewers, I don't think you have Xcode, so this probably won't even work for you.

But for the programmers who have Xcode and for the Unix nerds who have it, whatever, you can go ahead and check this. Now instead of creating a .app, let me just show you with this; it'll export it as a Unix program, and I will call it Glass Shatter. The way to run this is to open up Terminal and drag this in, and you can—there's also a dash-dash Loop flag which will make it play on loop.

Okay, so that's the Unix executable. Now, we're going to have some fun and show a practical use for this. This isn't really a practical use, but it's more of a prank you can do. So what we're going to do is we're going to drag in Nyan Cat. Let me just play you—if you don't know what Nyan Cat is, it's basically a loop of that. This is like a song; it's an MP3 file version, so I drag this in.

Oh, sorry, I have to make it an app. So we're going to have Loop Audio, but we're not going to check Show in Dock. We're going to drag this in, we're going to call it Nyan.

All right, now here's where the fun would begin: You take this on a flash drive or whatever to your friend's computer. You put it in there, wherever, on their desktop, wherever. You double-click it, and it starts playing, and they can't get rid of it. But they probably won't know how to do that, so they'll get really annoyed, especially since we had Loop; it would play forever and ever and ever.

So it's just a fun little prank that you can do. So that is how to convert on the Mac—how to convert any audio file to an executable or an app. So thanks for watching, Mack Kids 101. Subscribe, and goodbye!