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You can run Bxfr straight from the website, or download a standalone version for Windows or Mac. It looks like this:

That's... a lot of buttons and controls. It looks overwhelming, but don't worry; you don't need to understand what they all do to get started.

First, concentrate on the top seven buttons on the left: Pickup/Coin, Laser/Shoot, Explosion, Powerup, Hit/Hurt, Jump, and Blip/Select. Click any, and it will generate a sound effect that fits the category.

When you find something you like, you can click Mutation to alter it a little bit. (Randomize, by contrast, will just give you a brand new, random effect.)

If you kept Create New Sound ticked, then you'll now have a bunch of effects in the bottom-left list. You can click any to play it again, and then type to rename it or click the X button to remove it.

The buttons at the bottom right let you share, save, and load your sound effects. When you've got something you like, you can hit Export Wav to save it as a wav file, which you should be able to use directly in any game engine (or at least convert to another format that can be used, like MP3 or OGG).

Alternatively, you can hit Save to Disk to export a bfxrsound file, which looks like this:

This is the same format used by the Copy and Paste buttons - try copying that above string into Bfxr and you'll see what I mean. Alternatively, you can use the Copy Link button, which gives you a link like this that encodes the bfxrsound data and automatically passes it to the tool.

The central panel gives you a whole heap of options. Let's look at a few:

Every slider and button has tooltip text explaining what it does - although in many cases it might be easier just to fiddle around with the value and listen to how it changes the sound! As you do so, you can overwrite your current effect with the Apply Synth button, or go back to how the effect initially sounded with the Revert Synth button.

The lock icon to the side of each control lets you state that you don't want it to be affected by the Randomize or Mutation buttons. You could, for example, lock everything except the Attack Time, Sustain Time, and Decay Time sliders and repeatedly hit Randomize to get a range of effects that sound similar but last different lengths of time.

Finally, the Mixer tab lets you overlap up to five of the effects you've made.

Bfxr, by Stephen Lavelle, is based on Tom Vian's as3sfxr, which in turn is an AS3 port of Tomas Pettersson's sfxr.

Sfxr and as3sfxr have fewer features, as the screenshot above shows, but that does make them a little less overwhelming. There's also a Mac version, cfxr, and a JavaScript version, jsfx.

Tom Vian gave a presentation on as3sfxr at the Flash on the Beach conference (since renamed to Reasons to be Creative):

As well as giving a fantastic overview of what all the sliders do, he also mentions the SfxrSynth AS3 class, which lets you import as3sfxr effect data into a Flash game's code and even mutate it on the fly. Bfxr offers the same functionality - see this API example for some sample code. Zeh Fernando has also ported this synthesiser to Unity.

Finally, I recommend checking out Mark Wonnacott's IECSFXR - Three new ways to use sfxr, which offer new interfaces for as3sfxr:

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