Uploaded sound too hard to hear

Hi,

Quick question I hope.

I have made some sounds that when I upload into SL I can barely hear them. I raised my voice in one of them but still get very low sound coming from it.

Am I doing somingthing wrong? I am using Audacity for recording the sound which sounds fine on my desktop

thanks in advance for any help

I've had this happen myself. I recommend upping the volume of the sounds in Audacity or whatever you use before uploading.

All input sounds are set to max but still can't hear anything

No, I mean load the sound file into Audacity and increase the volume of the file. Save, then re-upload to SL.

If you're not hearing "anything", then you have a different problem.

what is your output set at?

output volume is set to 1.0

OK and how do I do that? Sorry newbie here

There is an "amplify" option in Audacity. It's under the "effects" pull down.

fir off what is the output bit rate you are using??
is it 128 bit or lower and are you saving these as wav files?

The bit rate is set at 128 and yes as a wav file

Cool that did it. Thanks now I can actually hear the sound


Thanks again

that still sounds like something is not right..you shouldn't have to add an effect to a sound file to get sound..

I use Audacity on a regular basis and it is notorious for recording at a lower volume. What I do is use the Amplify filter and pull the slider up until the dB numbers are grayed out. That tells you where it begins to clip. Then "allow clipping" and add 3 dB. That gives you the maximum audio without distortion.

Also, realize that the audio you hear in SL is dependent on your camera position. If your camera is across the room when you play the audio, you won't hear it, but everyone right around you will (unless their cameras are across the room, too)

well that makes sense now..sl is a strange breed for files lol.
i'm used to premiere and divx and xvid and things for a lot of my compression and stuff..

i mainly used audacity for editing ease..
but then again it wasn't for ranged hearing either..
they should really go to mp3 instead of wave files .but i'm sure there is a good reason they don't. probably because you would be able to get full songs on the same size file as the bit of file they let you use in a wav is my guess..then you get into the whole copyright crap and just more headaches lol

In some sound editors there is a simple command to Normalize audio -- that is, adjust it so that the highest peak is a maximum-level sample or very close to one. (I've seen some where the default is to max at -0.1db or the like because there are some older digital-to-analog converters that misbehave on maximum value samples.) You almost always want to normalize any audio that you are planning to use online in any way, including SL uploads.

Audacity has a Normalize command (Effects/Normalize) and it even lets you pick the peak value (default is -0.0db).

Normalizing doesn't always do the trick; sometimes you will have audio where you have one or two really loud samples (from a short burst of noise, applause, or whatever) but the average level is much lower. You have to decrease the level of those peaks first and then normalize, or apply compression to the file. It's not likely to be an issue with the short clips that you can upload to SL.