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Sound uploads drastically lose volume

Lazure Ryba
Registered User
Join date: 14 Jun 2008
Posts: 9
09-11-2008 11:07
When I take a sound that's reasonably loud outside of SL, throughout windows, and upload it to SL. It suddenly sounds so soft, people can barely hear it, even when the camera's right on my avatar.

When I make and record sounds in say, Soundforge, I have to jack the volume up so high on the sound file, that it distorts really bad just for it to be audible in-world.

My SL sound settings are set to their maximum on the sliders, as well. Is there a reason for this? Is there any way to keep the volume intact when uploading to SL?

Yet, some people have really loud gestures, like dragon roars and foghorns. How did they do it?
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Ovaltine Constantine
Registered User
Join date: 28 Jul 2008
Posts: 179
09-19-2008 19:01
I'd like an answer to this too.
Peggy Paperdoll
A Brat
Join date: 15 Apr 2006
Posts: 4,383
09-19-2008 19:18
This pretains to burning CD's but it might be relevant. It sounds like the same issue to me:

http://www.komando.com/tips/index.aspx?id=5449
SuezanneC Baskerville
Forums Rock!
Join date: 22 Dec 2003
Posts: 14,229
09-19-2008 19:50
An old post from 2003. /120/5f/449/1.html , might help:
From: someone

***FROM FRANK LINDEN
There seems to be a lot of confusion about sound volumes, and what is appropriate. Unfortunately I think we added to the confusion with some of our example objects. Here's the skinny:

When uploading sounds, it's important to "normalize" that source file. That means to bring the levels up so that the highest peak of the waveform is exactly at 100%, or 0dB, or 7ffff or 32767, or whatever your sound editor displays as the maximum.

The next step is to upload the sound using an appropriate bitrate. Speech and simple sounds work well at the 64 kbps setting; only music or other very complex sounds will benefit from being encoded at 96 or 128k. Encoding speech at 128 yields almost no discernable improvement in quality at a considerable expense in the amount of lag for someone else to hear that sound when you trigger it the first time.

Shorter sounds are also better; again, it reduces the delay before someone else hears your sound. For things like animal sounds and environmental noises, building up a complex sound out of smaller pieces randomly triggered in time rather than recording a long loop will result in a faster and more interesting experience for your audience.

Now it's time to put the sound in an object and play it with a script. . . here's where most of the problems lie. The volume parameter to llPlaySound(), llTriggerSound(), and the llLoopSound() calls has a "normal" range from 0.0 to 1.0. With very few exceptions sounds should have a volume in that range, and quiet sounds (like a mouse squeak or a crackling fire) should be at the bottom end.

All is well and good with that, except that very loud noises (like explosions) sound way too quiet if you're not standing right on top of them, even at a volume of 1.0. The root of it is the apparent distance the sound carries: a door slam, even a loud one, doesn't carry nearly as far as a bomb blast. So we thought one way to handle these special cases was to allow volumes "above 1.0" which is a bit like turning your amp to 11 (thank you Spinal Tap). A volume of 2.0, for example, is not any louder than a volume of 1.0 if you are standing right next to the object. However, it maintains its volume twice as far as the sound with a gain of 1.0. That is, if the object with a gain of 1.0 becomes inaudible 50 meters away, the object with a gain of 2.0 is still quite audible until 100 meters. The effect, when used appropriately, is good: explosions and other extremely "loud" noises carry long distances and we get to have things like fireworks shows.

Unfortunately, it can also lead to a squeaky mouse audible from 1000 meters away (the mouse in question was using a volume of 10.0, which is really only appropriate for nuclear events... it has since been given laryngitis and a more reasonable volume of 0.5)

Another bit of confusion I suspect leads to inflated sound volumes is that the sound you hear is based on your camera's position (your camera's ears, not your avatar's, are what you hear with). So if you are building with your camera 10 meters in the air, it's likely you'll crank the volume inappropriately high in order to hear it. When adjusting volumes, the best strategy is to use mouselook, where the camera and your head are one and the same. That way the volume that "sounds right" will be reasonable when someone else's camera is two meters away.

Any thoughts for improvement are welcome and encouraged! We could limit the max volume to 1.0, which would address some of the problem, at the expense of eliminating sounds you really DO want to carry that far. Or we could implement some fuzzy logic AI to analyze the contents of the sound and automatically assign an appropriate volume (just give us a few years to code that up).


-Frank


This suggests to me that one can use a volume greater than one to make the sound reach farther, and use a sound clip edited to have a low or moderate volume to make a sound that isn't all that loud when close up , in combination, to make a sound that isn't too loud close up but doesn't fade out to nothing at a short distance away.

Haven't tried it though.
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Nyoko Salome
kittytailmeowmeow
Join date: 18 Jul 2005
Posts: 1,378
09-19-2008 19:59
:0 quick answer: use audacity (at least that's what i use) and level the sound to 0db, =period=... that's the only baseline anyone has to go by. (i still rue that darned 'babylaugh' sample that is still so overcranked it overpowers =everything= else in the area, radio streams include! ;0)
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