Hands-on and ridiculously in-depth with the Nintendo DSi

Here we come to perhaps the most contentious of the onboard functions of the DSi, Nintendo DSi Sound. The problem is that it has some music player functionality, but it only supports AAC files, and not the standard works-on-everything-by-everyone MP3. Even if you accept (as you should) that Sound is no iPod replacement and that its primary function is play, just as Camera, you still end up with the core problem of being unable to load your music into the system in the first place to use its advertised feature unless your music is already in AAC format—typically, this is only the case if you're an iTunes user and have encoded your CDs using iTunes' default settings.

Okay, with that out of the way, Sound is definitely more audio toy than serious audio player, and definitely 100% Nintendo. If you do load your music in, you can play it back in several shuffle and replay modes, and cycle through a number of visualizers, including, as expected, a few Nintendo-themed ones. (My personal favorite is Excitebike-themed; the peaks in your music create hills on the course.) But the music isn't content to just play; you can play with it as well.

The L and R buttons can be used to play sounds as your music plays from several built-in options, such as a bass drum/snare set and—yes—a cat meow/dog bark set. Animal noises aside, this is my favorite activity; it's just fun to sit in a chair and drum along.


There's also a couple touch-based options, including a pitch/speed pad that you can use to muck about with the music, giving you the ability to make any song either sound like an Alvin & the Chipmunks reunion or a goth epic. There are a few mostly-silly filters as well, like one that makes your music sound like it's coming off a tinny AM radio, another that transforms the stream into a mess of 8-bit sounds, and still one more that claims to remove vocals but really does about a good a job as any vocal-removal filter ever has done: that is, not a good job at all.

Music isn't the whole picture with Sound, though. There's 18 slots for you to record up-to-10-second snippets of your own voice or whatever the mic can pick up, then manipulate them. There's several more options this time around vs. music.

The radio and etc. filters are gone, but there are twelve new filters to play with instead, suited particularly well to voice recordings. Parakeet, Robot and Helium are all voice-changers; Electric Fan, Tunnel and Transceiver (radio) effects. Low, High and Synth Harmony add voices to your own.

Trumpet, Whistle and Buzzer re-render your sound sample with an appropriate synthesized sound, and I must say, Trumpet in particular can do a pretty good imitation of Charlie Brown's teacher. Apart from the filters, you get the pitch/speed pad again as well as the option to play your sound backwards in case you're in need of a handy portable Satanic possession test kit.

Something else that might go unnoticed, but is nonetheless fun and decidedly Nintendo is the little parakeet that sits at Sound's main menu. Inside the game, he'll give you tips if you tap him, but here he's just sitting there listening, and will repeat phrases and sounds he hears in high-pitched parakeet. If you've got recorded sounds, he'll repeat those as well.