Author Topic: New Sound Recordings (Weapons, Etc) (Read 7253 times)

jitspoe · « **on:** September 22, 2008, 03:23:40 PM »

I'm going to start a thread about new sound recording for the guns and whatnot. Mewa pointed out that the new recordings I had done were clipped and offered to edit some new sounds if I could provide raw recordings that weren't clipped. I'm just going to reply to his PM here.

Quote from: mewa on September 20, 2008, 08:33:03 PM

first off let me offer my utmost respect. you nailed it. awesome recordings.

both being in true stereo and no longer clipping makes the guns sound great.

i'm now totally convinced that the disdain i and many others had for the newer

sounds was completely due to the clipping issues, and not some preference for

what was accustomed to.i cant explain how excited i am with these recordings.

next step (i wanna integrate these and get people using them asap)? whats your

criteria for samples used in game. single shot/short bursts/full auto? or all

three? can they be used in game as stereo, i kinda assume so but thought to

ask. out of curiosity, which do you like the best for a mag and cocker sample

(filename_time). let me know whatever steps need to be taken to get these ready

for release, (soundpack update?).

the only two suggestions i can think to offer up for future recordings are;

- there is some dc-bias (waveform isn't symmetrical, due to some inherent

voltage pushing it one way or the other) action going on. cool edit can adjust

for this, but if you can on the recording device it would be better.

- there is a intermittant soft meep sound in the background of some recordings

(autococker_dry_raw_-3db.wav). I've heard this before and its probably from

some computer processing or interference from either rf or powersupply stuff.

uploading the sound again from the recording device should clear it up.

once again, amazing man. makes me happy.

mewa.rules

ps - feel free to make this and the other chats into a forum post if you would

prefer public input, or just prefer doing this stuff that way.

The sounds aren't actually stereo. The sound card on the laptop I used doesn't support stereo recording, I guess, and I haven't gotten everything straightened out to record on my new laptop (having issues with either vista, the drivers, or the sound card itself). That's not really important, though, as the sounds must be mono to be used in the game, anyway (the stereo positioning all depends on where the sounds are coming from in the 3D world).

As for criteria:
- Each weapon has 1 sound effect that it plays (with the exception of the automag and autococker, which have 2 sound clips for a little variation, so they don't sound too repetitive).
- Each weapon also has a dry fire effect (can't remember if the auto's have more than one or not. Might want to pick out two, just to be sure).
- Sound clip must fit within the firing rate of the weapon: Autos need to be 1/10th of a second or less. PGP is 1 second. Others are somewhere in between - all multiples of 0.1 seconds (I'll look them up as necessary. The firing rates may be documented around here somewhere. Those times will be the average - the minimum time between firing is rounded down to the nearest 1/10th of a second, and that's how long the clips should be, so they don't get cut short/overlap. This may require adding/deleting some from the sound to get it to fit well.
- Echo and background noise should be removed as much as possible.
- 16 bit 48khz mono .wav files.

Not sure what to do about the volume of the sound. Perhaps I could come up with a system that can scale up the volume of certain sound effects (or scale down the volume of everything else until all the sounds have been re-done).

I don't know if there's anything I can do about the dc bias, unless it's a software issue. I was having a big problem with this on my new laptop (the whole wave was sitting significantly below the center when there was little to no sound). I thought that was just the sound card on that computer, though. Maybe it's something with the pre-amp or mic and XP (or the drivers) compensated for it on my old laptop but not the new one?

I have NO idea what's up with the "meep". I've never had that in any of my recordings before. I was rather annoyed by that, but fortunately it only happened in a couple recordings. There should be plenty of sound clips to choose from.

As for which I like best - I haven't had time to really sit down and listen to all of the recordings and pick out something. From past recordings, typically the first shot in a group tended to work best as there wasn't as much echo being picked up.

jitspoe · « **Reply #1 on:** September 24, 2008, 05:24:30 PM »

BTW, for those who thought the PGP sounded weird - here it is in a video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3aYJCyRfwA

mewa · « **Reply #2 on:** October 22, 2008, 12:36:52 AM »

Sorry for the long delay. Here's where I'm at with this;

I 've got the gun rates off sk89q's site, hopefully thats accurate.
I've tried out alot of samples, some good ones but nothings definitive yet.
DC-bias is adjustable as an acitve input feature on Cool Edit.
Background noise is minimal, the recordings are done outdoors, the most aneochic (absorbant/dead) space

Other than that, not much update. Shouldnt take too much time to implament recordings into the game, just need to find that time.

-mewa.rules

jitspoe · « **Reply #3 on:** October 22, 2008, 01:07:13 PM »

I actually got a nice upgrade for my birthday:
http://www.azdencorp.com/shop/customer/product.php?productid=93299

So I've been re-recording sounds yet again. I've actually got new sounds ready for the automag, trracer, and stingray. I'll try to upload those, as well as the raw recordings, so you can check them out. They're a bit difficult to edit and get sounding correct in-game. Since the firing of the weapon is so loud, to get a recording without clipping means it will sound super quiet in game. I tried some different VST compressors and such, but couldn't get anything remotely close to what I wanted, so I resorted to hand editing the files. I'd select the large spikes/peaks in the waves, normalize them to like -18db, then when everything was at -18 or less, normalize the whole thing to -0.3db.

KnacK · « **Reply #4 on:** October 22, 2008, 01:35:42 PM »

lol they still make those mic's?

I had a few of those back in the 80's when I wa shooting tv commercials.

jitspoe · « **Reply #5 on:** October 22, 2008, 03:39:47 PM »

Are you referring to shotgun mics, or that particular model.

mewa · « **Reply #6 on:** October 23, 2008, 06:19:17 AM »

If your'e still using Cool Edit Pro 2.0, theres plenty of adequete compessors in there. I'd recommend bumping everything to 24/32 bit first (use the auto convert upon open" option) and then do things like normalize->hard compress w/short attack, etc. Theres really no reason to have clipped sample

If you want, pick the "firings"/samples you want and I'll take care of the rest. I spent the large majority of the time I worked on this just trying to decide which sound clip to use.

KnacK · « **Reply #7 on:** October 23, 2008, 06:26:09 AM »

That model.

It's a great mic.

mewa · « **Reply #8 on:** October 23, 2008, 08:10:28 AM »

feel like selling that stereo condensor mic?

mewa · « **Reply #9 on:** October 27, 2008, 03:49:49 PM »

jitspoe, upload whatever sounds you want in b24 and i'll run some batch scripts on them (normalize, compress, etc.)

jitspoe · « **Reply #10 on:** October 28, 2008, 10:13:42 AM »

mewa · « **Reply #11 on:** December 03, 2008, 06:03:20 PM »

My version of the magnum. I think you tried to compress the entire sound instead of just the bad part. You end up losing the basic waveform that way and introducing too much trash.

http://www.zshare.net/audio/5221831918918042/

mewa · « **Reply #12 on:** December 18, 2008, 04:23:22 PM »

Well, the guns are done as far as I know. I would like to redo the other sounds in the game, but I will need some help from the community finding/getting the original sources. I know that this is something discussed in the past and that Jitspoe wasn't too enthusied by the idea because of the copywrite issues. I can fully understand that, but until all new sounds are made for the game this is what we've got and they might as well be up to par.

jitspoe · « **Reply #13 on:** January 25, 2009, 04:48:03 PM »

So this is interesting. I was curious how left4dead managed to make their sounds so loud. The answer? Severe clipping. I'm not sure if it's really possible to make the gun sounds as loud as they really should be without clipping. Left4dead must make the audidophiles cringe when they play. Looks like they applied some filters after the fact, but the original recordings were clipped pretty badly.

mewa · « **Reply #14 on:** January 29, 2009, 12:14:17 AM »

gotta plead ignorance on this one. who is left4dead? and less important, what program do you have open there.

as for the clipping, not shocking at all. it's quickly become not only acceptable to clip recordings, but practically the standard. countless psychoacoustics (the study of perception of sound) studies show that loud = good, in the human brain. when set against an identical softer sound, the louder will always be; considered more important, have better tonality (even when its severally clipped), more pleasing, more preferred in general, on and on. this is why tv stations keep getting louder, why some commercials just pop out as being far louder, even professional recording are plagued with engineers sacrificing distortion for loudness. the thing these people dont quite understand is that loudness is always relative, and the human mind is incredibly sophisticated at adaptation. the brain will compensate for many scenarios, such as when you enter an environment, the space is "calculated" and the brain prepares for an expected loudness, reverberation time, etc. so this loudness trickery is handy for desperate advertisers, but does little good when your audience is listening to the audio for more than a minute or so. subconsciously or consciously, a person will adjust the volume to a reasonable level.

sorry for the background ramble, it's well known hot button for audiophiles. these files are actually not so bad (i think yours were* worst to be honest). they are clipped only at a few projectable places, and they're not all that much information missing (above the amplitude limit). maybe someone tried to compress and failed slightly.

as far as gaming sounds and their dynamic ranges, a simple mind will insist on heavily compressed sounds thinking they want to hear the footsteps of a person on the other side of the map. this isn't well thought out since when you compress the dynamic range you lose the ability to judge distance. it's very easy for us to tell how far away someone is just by the change in loudness of their noises. so in games it's wise to preserve dynamic range, not only for sound quality, but for the extra information it can convey.

another good reason to avoid clipping and compression for games is the fatigue factor. long hours of listening to distorted and convoluted sounds gives the user aural fatigue and can even become an annoyance factor. given that many players like to play for extended periods, it's wise to make the sounds as "pure" as possible.

it's interesting to note that there is a ~10hz fundamental wave present in both the first and second tracks (and possibly the third, although theres not enough information to make this clear). in the first track this is seen as a sine wave, but in the second its closer to a secant shape. these are probably artifacts of crossovers, the second being of a higher order.

thats all i got. class dismissed.

Eiii · « **Reply #15 on:** January 29, 2009, 12:15:50 AM »

Quote from: mewa on January 29, 2009, 12:14:17 AM

who is left4dead?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left_4_Dead

jitspoe · « **Reply #16 on:** January 29, 2009, 11:05:32 AM »

http://www.wavosaur.com/ is the program.

The clipping in these is far worse in these than my recordings. The majority of the sound is completely clipped out in these areas. Like look at the area around :009 in the first file. It spends more time clipped than not. The only reason a lot of the areas aren't clipped is because some filters or other edits have been applied, but you can still see the flat angles or weird curves where areas used to be clipped. My guess is these are low pass (or is it high pass - I always get them mixed up) filters to remove shake or wind noises.

jitspoe · « **Reply #17 on:** January 30, 2009, 03:04:55 AM »

I'm not really sure why there is so much opposition to the new weapon sounds. They're basically the equivalent of the high-res texture pack for sounds. The old sounds were stored in a very low-quality 8-bit, 22khz format. The new sounds are recordings of the same types of guns (many of which I purchased personally) with reasonably high quality equipment stored in a 16-bit 48khz format. In short, the new sounds should be superior in every way possible, and if they're not, let me know what can be done to improve them.

If you don't like the new sounds:

a) Make sure your audio settings are set to 48khz.
b) Give yourself some time to adjust to the new sounds. Try playing with them for a month or so instead of immediately dismissing them.

T3RR0R15T · « **Reply #18 on:** January 30, 2009, 09:30:46 AM »

Yes, that are high quality sounds. But it looks like there are new sounds for the same weapon with each new build (21,23,24,25). So everyone must adjust to (a few) new sounds in each build. I think that is the most important thing, not the sounds themself.
Maybe it would have been better to release them all together in one build (or make an option to use high / low quality sounds like the textures). But it is too late and who cares... In 2-3 month no one knows the old sounds anymore.

mewa · « **Reply #19 on:** February 01, 2009, 09:28:17 PM »

One of the major reason's for the opposition is bound to be acclimation. This is a major hurdle for anyone trying to change the sound of something people have gotten used to. It's just the way it's going to be and useless to fight against it, but this means that the sounds should be changed as infrequently as possible.

Having said this, I don't think it's the only opposition to the new sounds. I myself am not very fond of them for a few reasons, one of which is probably what I just mentioned. Unfortunately, most people won't have the experience to identify what it is specifically that they dislike, and just reply to you that they generally don't like the new sounds. I'll try my best to identify a few of the main issues I have with them.

I think timbre issues are certainly a large reason. Noisy and convoluted higher pitched sounds can be extremely fatiguing over time, and even considered annoying.

Here is one of the sounds I find most offensive out of the new batch (annoying1crop.jpg). You can see that not only is it clipping still, but there is just loads of inharmonic high frequency crap, including excess data extending well above the cutoff frequencies for proper resampling (22.05khz and 24khz). I'd most certainly throw a "brickwall" filter onto the original sound before blaming the resampling algorith for "jangly" noises. This all cumulates to a pretty unpleasant sound.

There is still the issue of clipping going on in most of the sounds. Some of it has obvious sources, like the sounds with too high an input simply have all the data above 0db missing. Others are more curious, like this one, doubleclipped_cropped.jpg

It has the highs of both transients removed, despite the entire wave being below the -1db mark. Did you use a hard limit compressor on this and lower the level of the entire second transient? It looks very strange and will definitely carry a lot of artifacts with it.

I think a good idea would be to just record at a greater distance. The clipping right of the bat tells me you're too close, that along with the extraneous high frequency noises lead to one simple solution. When you record from further away you'll get a more balanced frequency responce and also the much needed lower level. Don't be concerned with overall volume yet because that is so easy to remedy. Let the air do it's natural job of being a buffer and helping you record nice sounds. I forgot how close you said you had been recording at, but try to step back about another 2-3ft.

When you've got a series of shots recorded, browse through them and find a few samples that sound right to you. Then send them off me with a note telling me which you like (and probably the length they need to be), I'll take care of the rest.