Author Topic: Sound problems (Read 6092 times)

|iR|Focalor · « **on:** January 22, 2009, 02:58:40 PM »

I have a really fishy problem going on here. I'm trying to create some custom sounds to use for a few things in pak files. Yesterday, I had this one railgun fire sound that I stuck in a pak, and it worked fine, but the tone was little muddled. I edited the wav file in an audio editing prog (Magix Audio Cleaning lab 10) to add a little more treble to it. When I stuck the resulting wav file in the pak and tested it out in-game, anytime I'd fire the railgun, the sound would just loop over and over forever and wouldn't stop. I tried messing around with the editing program to see if there were any weird settings I could play with to remedy it, but nothing helped. On MIRC, X'tyfe mentioned something about the possibility of the editor adding in a que point or something. I never could determine what was going on, so I just scrapped that file.

Today I came across some sounds I wanted to use for the machinegun/chaingun bullet firing sounds. I did not load them into my editor. I simply shaved off the dead-time at the front of the sound to make the firing play immediately. I'm having the same problem with these sounds as well. I've found other sounds that I've used and they work fine. But this one is repeating over and over again. The format is no different from anything else I've used, all 44.100 kHz, 16 Bit, Mono.

Anybody got any ideas why this happening and what I can do to make these wav's play correctly in the game?

ReCycled · « **Reply #1 on:** January 22, 2009, 03:51:00 PM »

Quote from: [EoM]Focalor on January 22, 2009, 02:58:40 PM

The format is no different from anything else I've used, all 44.100 kHz, 16 Bit, Mono.
Anybody got any ideas why this happening and what I can do to make these wav's play correctly in the game?

Yikes...that's a really high sampling rate. I've edited simple wave files for years. For Quake2, I've never gone higher than 22050 Hz (8 bit mono). Its not necessary in Quake and will chew up a little bit more bandwidth the higher you sample. 11025 is plenty. I believe a standard .wav file should be PCM audio in order to play correctly. There are some older formats that will cause errors. I also think 16 bit is stereo, not mono.

[BTF] Reflex · « **Reply #2 on:** January 23, 2009, 08:51:19 AM »

I've messed with just about every sound in the game, never had this.

might try it with different editors... and of course what recycled said

|iR|Focalor · « **Reply #3 on:** January 23, 2009, 01:02:26 PM »

Quote from: [BTF] Reflex on January 23, 2009, 08:51:19 AM

I've messed with just about every sound in the game, never had this.

might try it with different editors... and of course what recycled said

That's really the only "editor" I have. I have ACID Music 2.0 on my older music studio PC, but it's not really an "editor", even though I can use it to create new wav files from whatever I tweak within the loop region. I just figured it would be a time consuming pain in the ass to shift files around from PC to PC like that, especially when I'm pessimistic enough to believe that it won'yt make a damn bit of difference anyway.

I'm thinking X'tyfe had a good idea when he mentioned something about que (cue??) points embedded in the file. The railgun sound I wanted to use actually came from a CD of techno/industrial loops that came with ACID Music 2.0. I'm thinking these other gunshot wav's were probably edited with some kind of loop based software too that embedded this crazy shit in it. I dunno, I've scoured the web and haven't been able to come up with any explanations yet.

|iR|Focalor · « **Reply #4 on:** January 23, 2009, 01:22:21 PM »

Quote from: ReCycled on January 22, 2009, 03:51:00 PM

Quote from: [EoM]Focalor on January 22, 2009, 02:58:40 PM
The format is no different from anything else I've used, all 44.100 kHz, 16 Bit, Mono.
Anybody got any ideas why this happening and what I can do to make these wav's play correctly in the game?

Yikes...that's a really high sampling rate. I've edited simple wave files for years. For Quake2, I've never gone higher than 22050 Hz (8 bit mono). Its not necessary in Quake and will chew up a little bit more bandwidth the higher you sample. 11025 is plenty. I believe a standard .wav file should be PCM audio in order to play correctly. There are some older formats that will cause errors. I also think 16 bit is stereo, not mono.

I personally don't think it would slow anything down having sounds with a higher sampling rate. If I'm not mistaken, all the sound data would be loaded in the RAM, and as long as you have plenty of RAM it should be fine. I've got 2Gb of RAM, so I should be more than capable of playing tons of large sized sound files. In game, I use the 22kHz sound setting because a lot of the sounds are IN 22kHz format, so boosting them to 44kHz adds lots of top end frequencies to them and makes it sound like shit. I'm not sure if any of the 44kHz sounds I use automatically get converted to 22kHz in game, I can't really tell with my ear. Downgrading some of the sounds to a lower bitrate seemed to obliterate the quality, thats why I kept it pretty high.

But maybe there's something to that. Maybe if I convert them to 22kHz that will take out whatever is causing it to loop. With machinegun bullet sounds, it's not looping ALL 5 of the bullets, it seems to only be repeating ONE of them. And whenever I get another gun and fire it, it stops looping.

Anyway, if any knowledgeable Q2 mapper/developers read this and know what is causing this problem, shoot me some fix-it's please.

ReCycled · « **Reply #5 on:** January 23, 2009, 07:10:46 PM »

I use Audio Editor Gold and its fairly intuitive. If you stick to 22Khz - 8 bit mono, the quality will be very close to CD quality. Many standard Quake sounds are half that rate. They're simple sounds so a higher rate doesn't improve fidelity. But use 8 -bit, not 16 bit. Quake wants mono sounds only so you can pinpoint where the sound is coming from. I can mail you the program if you want. Its 8.2 meg. If that's too big. HJ Split can chop into smaller chunks and then you just re-assemble.

|iR|Focalor · « **Reply #6 on:** January 23, 2009, 07:42:46 PM »

I tried converting them to 22khz and no change, still looping some of them.

I appreciate the offer, but no thanks. This Magix Audio Cleaning Lab 10 can do tons of stuff, and so far its worked beautifully for EQing and beefing up the vocal tracks I record with this cheesy little computer mic I use. It has all kinds of stuff in it that I'll probably never even use. I can remove background noises, even clean up recordings from vinyl records or cassette tapes that you wish to make into MP3's via some kind of spectral cleaning plug-in. I have no idea how to begin to use most of the stuff in this thing.

Anyway, I think I'm just gonna scrap the idea of doing anything with these sounds until I can figure out whats making it loop. I've already spent too much time worrying about it.

ReCycled · « **Reply #7 on:** January 23, 2009, 07:53:14 PM »

Can you attach one of the "sounds" to this post and maybe I can toy with it. Seems odd what its doing and I'm curious. Anything above 1 meg won't attach here but it shouldn't be that large anyway.

|iR|Focalor · « **Reply #8 on:** January 23, 2009, 09:26:56 PM »

Yeah, take a stab at it. These are the 5 bullet sounds at the original sampling rate: 44khz, 16bit, mono. Only modifications I've made to them is shaving off some of the dead time at the front of the sound using the basic Sound Recorder.

ReCycled · « **Reply #9 on:** January 24, 2009, 05:03:27 AM »

Got em. At first glance I noticed all 5 shots in Quake2 are exactly .31 seconds long. Yours are 1.40 seconds. There's a lot of space after the actual sound renders. So I guess Quake is confused when it starts the second .wav file, assuming the first is done, but the first sound file isn't finished. So maybe there's overlap. Anyway I'll chop off the dead air and make it exactly .31 second (all 5 of them).

ReCycled · « **Reply #10 on:** January 24, 2009, 06:10:26 AM »

Try these....22050 Hz - 16 bit mono. Should be .31 seconds long.

|iR|Focalor · « **Reply #11 on:** January 24, 2009, 01:17:47 PM »

Well, there is a difference now. Now that the sounds are shorter, it loops faster.

PANTONE 7717C · « **Reply #12 on:** January 24, 2009, 02:11:07 PM »

Type 'soundlist' in the console and you'll see a list of all loaded sounds with some info. If you look at the attached image you see sounds that appear to have some sort of embedded 'loop flag'.

I know the 'plats/pt1_mid' wav is a sound that is made to loop so I'm pretty sure that the "L" stands for looping sound. Now I know how to set a sound to loop in a map-editor, but I have no idea how to set a wav to loop or 'unloop' in the wav itself...

ReCycled · « **Reply #13 on:** January 24, 2009, 02:41:59 PM »

Huh...I've never heard of a flag in a wave file that will cause it to loop. I made sure all of them were generic PCM audio. The only odd thing I saw was that Sound Recorder will show the complete waveform in the Quake sound file but not yours (see screenshot) but I didn't think much of it. If there is a flag, it must be at the beginning (because I cut out 3/4 of the end portion). To get rid of it I guess you could cut off the first few milliseconds of the waveform and see if it that works.

|iR|Focalor · « **Reply #14 on:** January 24, 2009, 02:53:31 PM »

Quote from: ReCycled on January 24, 2009, 02:41:59 PM

Huh...I've never heard of a flag in a wave file that will cause it to loop. I made sure all of them were generic PCM audio. The only odd thing I saw was that Sound Recorder will show the complete waveform in the Quake sound file but not yours (see screenshot) but I didn't think much of it. If there is a flag, it must be at the beginning (because I cut out 3/4 of the end portion). To get rid of it I guess you could cut off the first few milliseconds of the waveform and see if it that works.

Hehe, unfortunately, I already DID chop off the front of those to make the blast occur as soon as possible. Must be something embedded throughout the entire file.

Author Topic: Sound problems (Read 6092 times)

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