last night i made alot of nice sound effects with this (windows only though)program called SFXR
heres a link to the website
http://www.cyd.liu.se/~tompe573/hp/project_sfxr.html
enjoy
nice one!
had some fun with it 
yes you can make some nice samples with it for sure. 
I just want to add, that there is a source code package available.
I’ve just built and used it successfully in linux.
very nice tool indeed.