Question about Sound Uploads

Since I am not sure where this should actually go... Resident Answers sounds good. I am working on a project that includes sounds. But, when I upload the sound... it is lower then what I heard in my player. Is there something I need to do prior to uploading it? Or is there some setting within SL that I am not looking at? (I have my volume up both sound and master all the way and it still sounds low)

One thing to remember is that the sounds is louder the closer your camera is to the source, and softer the further your camera is away from the source. If you're just playing it out of your inventory, bring the camera in close to your avatar before playing it.

Also, I have only done a few sound uploads, but I remember that I had to crack up the volume way up before uploading them to get a volume that I wanted in SL.

Sounds are automatically a little quieter than your source when uploaded. The reason for this is due to the various sound settings in one's sound preferences. I don't recall the specifics, unfortunately.

Bear in mind that some of those settings, when severely altered, can actually hurt your speakers.

In Audition, I generally increase 6db, listen and if that isn't good I up it another 3db. If it gets too distorted, back off and just go with what sounds good without clipping

Like Mari says, they get muted a little bit when you bring them into the system. Depending on the kind/length of the sounds you may be able double or even triple up on them to increase volume. Test it in a gesture first, and just call the same sound twice at the exact same time. The trick works. If you like how it sounds, then just call it twice from your project script as well.

I too uploaded some new door open / close sounds. They were normalized to almost 100%, but after uploading I can barely hear them. And darn it - we NEED new door sounds.

I'll try the doubling approach, but I hope it doesn't give that weird phase shifter effect you hear when two water sounds are running at the same time just slightly off sync.

I've uploaded a gazillion sound files for my products and I found it best to "Hard Limit" the peaks of the sine waves down to the average db level of the rest of the file and then "Normalize" it all to 0db.

Audacity (free) and Audition will do this for you nicely.

Thanks all for the tips and suggestions. I finally got it to work, and will hopefully remember *makes a note* for when I work with sound again. Appreciate it

I boost the gain up to the point of clipping and then back down just a bit. Remember, you can always decrease the playback volume in the script, so you needn't worry about it being too loud in game.