http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts-apparel/interactive/a5bf/
Found this, looks like it might be an easy and affordable solution for pack sounds and music.
An SD card programmed and inserted allows you to customize the sounds, then just hit the button.
Thoughts?
It would be worth a shot. You could probably just pull the speaker/amp module from the shirt and put it in your pack, load up some sounds, and youd probably get a decent result depending on how loud it is. Not sure if you would be able to integrate the controls into your gun easily, but it would probably be better than nothing. Very intriguing idea!
I have been considering these as a functional alternative to ecto goggles: http://www.thinkgeek.com/geektoys/science/abf5/
(btw, you can probably find these cheaper at your local walmart.)
ThinkGeek is just the best. 
Background Music for YOUR Life?
I dunno… Peter Griffin had a rough time with that!
Man, that seems like a great idea!!!
“…riding on the bus, riding on the bus, sitting next to bums, there’s an empty seat, hope that isn’t pee…”
Yeah, along with your pack sounds you could probably store most (if not all) of the movie soundtrack. It looks like you can store and access up to 20 sounds. I also noticed you can set sounds to loop. So you could have the stream effect set to loop when you play it an then interrupt it with the power down sound.
I tell you, I’m finding this more and more intriguing the more I think about it. If you end up doing this, give us your impressions.
Rob Cockerham from Cockeyed.com has a good review of the eyeclops night vision goggles.
http://www.cockeyed.com/science/nightvision/nightvision01.shtml
I’m ordering the sound effects shirt today. I am hoping it is a reasonably cheap and easy alternative for sound effects 
I’ve actually been looking around on the forums for someone talking about this shirt. I dont know if anyone else is a member of the R2Builders club, but one of our members recently found good use of the thinkgeek shirt as a sound system for R2 units. I currently have one of them running in my R2 and it works great! You can remove the speaker and sound unit fairly easy from the shirt, the box for the batteries/soundboard is pretty tiny, actually the batteries take up majority of the box. I’d say it is about the size of a wallet. The wiring is very simple I took the wired remote off, hooked it up to a transmitter and now have it running off of a 12ch rf remote kit that I got off ebay on the cheap. Keep in mind with that setup you can only run 12 of the sounds from the SD card.
I imagine that you could do something similar on your pack and get good results. You actually could wire each sound individually to different push buttons/switches but it would probably get a bit messy to do. I am going to pick up another thinkgeek shirt in the next couple of weeks and wire it up to the gun, probably will try to find a creative way to hide the speaker under the gun track or perhaps the heatsink. The noise should be loud enough for most events, but you can always throw a cheap amp on it if not, I never put an amp on my r2 and it is pretty loud still. (there are buttons to adjust the volume).
Thinking logically about this, what is the need to put it into the pack at all? You could wear this under your uniform (the shirt is black anyway, just like the real uniform) and have the control box hanging on your belt. Just saying, it’d save a lot of hassle. I’m pretty intrigued by this, I’d have to see how loud it is first.
Wow! This is pretty spiffy! This would be a simple solution for adding sounds to our basic packs.
I have a very basic speaker that takes 3 aaa batteries that is built into a backpack, but it doesn’t have the remote for on the fly easy sound changes.
Since it also plays from a alternate sound source like an I pod, you could even probably use an MP3 playing cellphoen as well, if you chose to.
But the sd card with remote sounds nifty. It looks like the cord is long enough where you could pass it through your sleeve, and then may even make a wrist strap for it, like a wrist watch. That would give you easy one hand control over the sounds.
The remote wire wasn’t really that long on it. I’m thinking of doing this and just extending the wires as needed. If you actually put the whole mechanism in the gun you could run your gun sounds and everything from it.
From the pics in the video, it looked like the control wire was long enough to run completely down your sleeve… is that not the case? How long is it?
I’m no wiz at all at rewiring anything modern at all.
This is highly intriguing. I think I might get the shirt just for the hell of it. I had always pondered something like this for the pack/gun. I mean, they’ve had those dinky little sound fx keychains since I was a kid. I had always been stunned that I couldn’t find a higher quality version of those.
Buy the shirt now for half price. The shirt is currently 25% off and use coupon code HACKSURVEY09 for another $10 off to get the shirt for $26.28 shipped.
Thanks for the heads up, loosetoon! Ordered my sound effects shirt and it’s on its way.
Has anyone else got theirs yet? Any idea how loud this thing is?
Thanks for the discount code! I ordered two today, and they will actually ship today. Shipping for 2 is the same as shipping for one, plus you get enough geek points for some cool geek free swag with the next order.
There was a problem with my order, so the guy on the phione placed it himself.. when they do that, the order goes out the same day, so we should have them on friday!
WOW! They arreived in just two days!
Initial thoughts:
Battery box could possibly fit in the left shoulder pocket, and the remote wire could possibly be run down the arm, and clipped on the uniform sleeve. The cable is FAR too short for an easy long sleeved option.
The white on the t-shirt isn’t coming off, but you could possibly wear it backwards, with the speaker munited on it’s back, for a black t shirt look. The T IS thick and well made, however that isn;t always desirable for higher temp outings, like dragoncon was.
The short takes aaa batteries.. I’d hope it would take rechagible aa batteries.. time for a trip to the store!
I ordered one a few days before discovering the Replica Props Sound Board DIY tutorial.
I’ll be going with that DIY kit as an in-pack solution
EDIT: I got my shirt in the mail today, also. It gets pretty loud, but it begins to distort at the higher volumes. It’s not too bad though. I’ll probably just use the soundtrack shirt for music and incidental sounds not normally produced by a proton pack.
A note to anyone who gets this and wants to use custom sounds or songs on it: Try to rerecord the .mp3s in mono, as the player doesn’t put both stereo channels into the speaker, and you loose one of the channels.
Volume is plenty loud enough, I think, louder then I anticipated.
You MUST name the sound files 01.mp3, 02.mp3, ect. Naming them 1.mp3 will not work. 
Ok, and update.. we tried these out at a kids carnival event today, and they worked great! To easily use them, remove them from the t shirt.
We mounted the battry pack in the upper left corner of the motherboard, with velco.
I ran the wire through some extra 3/8" split loom. and attached the speaker again with velcro just under the alice frame on the left, about 1/3rd the way from the bottom of the motherboard. (That way it isn;t facing directly into your back, and more sound is heard.)
We then used another piece of velcro, and attached the control box onto0 the alice ■■■■■■■■ the front left strap (where the radio is in the video game)
I then used black duct tape to duct tape the loom on the motherboard. The switch is easily accessible on the outer left edge, and you can then just hit the buttons on the alice frame strap.
I included the main music theme, power up sound, operating hum, and thrower firing sound.
Next row is 4 various music bits, and the top left is the ecto siren sound.
In operation, as long as you aren’t in a very loud location (like a kid’s carnival) the sound is very effective. In a noisy area, not so much, but then actual pro pack sounds would also be ineffective as well.
Most of the time, I just let the theme music play, and I had it looping.
For $30, this was a great budget sound system that works pretty much as you’d like it to, and doesn’t detract from the pack apparance really at all.
(Plus since we used velcro, we can still remove it and use it again for other things..)
been sitting here trying to take it a step further by seeing if a separate manufacturer makes the sound system, but im coming up empty. think im gonna just break down and buy 4 of em. great find man.
Yeah, I looked as well, but anything I found was more expensive. For the price these were a great deal. We used old 1gb mini sd cards in standard sd adapters we had laying arounbd from an old cellphone, and they work fine.
I tried putting a numnber of songs together in a mega mp3, but it didn’t play that attempt.. I’ll try that again with fewer songs.. I was hoping for a 5 song loop, but some were extended 12" cuts.