Misc: For Those Who Need Help With Sound

[Jaymz]

Tricky, you need to set up loop points for the sound. As far as I know you need to do this with a program called sound forge. BF2 uses these loop points to repeat the sound on full auto.

[Twisted Helix]

Originally Posted by [R-DEV]Jaymz

But what I've learned is that if you want a really loud sound you need to make the actual wav file louder,

Just to add a little tip to this for those that might not know, there are two kinds of 'loudness' in a sound file ... you have 'peak' volume and 'RMS' volume.

Peak volume is the maximum amplitude that your sound file reaches ... and once this hits 0dB, you cannot go any higher. You can achieve this by 'normalizing' the file ... however once a file is normalized you cannot get anymore peak volume out of it.

RMS volume is the root mean square of the total amplitude in the track. This means that if you take the amplitude of each 'sample' slice (at 44k1Hz that is 44100 samples in a second of time), and then total them up and obtain the mean amplitude (its actually more complicated than this but I will spare you the maths jargon ), you have your RMS level.

Now perception of 'loudness' is based upon RMS level and not upon peak level, as it is perfectly possible to have transient peaks that the ear cannot hear due to the ear having a response time. Increasing RMS level is done through the use of compression or limiting. This has the effect of raising the 'quiet' parts of the sound closer to the 'loud' part of the sound .. and thus increasing the overall energy in the sound file (you can normalize the result or use make up gain to make sure you maintain your peak at 0dB). This has the effect of making the sound seem louder even though the peak has not changed.

One word of warning though ... it is possible to go too far down this path ... and to start making everything louder and louder until you really have nowhere left to go, and sonic integrity suffers as a result. The most important thing to remember is that percerption of volume is a relation ... one sound in relation to another ... and instead of turning something 'up' ... you can actually turn everything else ... 'down'.

[Jaymz]

Very good post there Helix, you're in the industry obviously

[Twisted Helix]

For those doing voice overs, and wanting to get a completely DEAD and DRY sound, there is this solution here.

The New & Improved Voice Over ?Porta-Booth?

What the article describes is incredibly cheap to construct, and with a bit of ingenuity you can pretty much reduce the cost of the mic booth to 0 .

And best of all ... it works (although you will need to have a non reflective surface behind the voice artist as well).

[Klikard]

hey. im trying To make This like extra far away sound. like in battlefield vietnam. Like a second 3rd person sound When You Far away. How do i do That? thanks in advance

[Klikard]

if You have Sound Forge This will help. Go to Special/region list/Insert. Then Press Region. Then Select Were You want The Sound To loop. example 0 To 2 sec

[Twisted Helix]

Originally Posted by Klikard

hey. im trying To make This like extra far away sound. like in battlefield vietnam. Like a second 3rd person sound When You Far away. How do i do That? thanks in advance

A combination of things will give the perception of distance ... rolling off high frequencies, and increasing reverberation.

However the BF2 engine has this built into it in the form of EAX.

[marcoelnk]

does anyone have some good sound reference websites (for rifles etc. ) ?

[Twisted Helix]

You mean like sound libraries ?

Yes ... but they cost.

[azn_chopsticks_boi]

Heh, i am assuming its the mg4 sounds