How important are door sounds?

Those deafening rushing water and waterfall sounds can be attributed to the poor audio encoding but the main cause is relying on llLoopSound for playback. It is not localized (louder when you approach, fade when moving away), so it sounds like it's blasting away in your ear even if you're 100m away.

I've seen prim streams that have 4 layered prims (for the animation) and then each of those prims has an embedded llLoopSound of the stream. Massive audio overkill and near impossible to mute.

If you're the object owner, deleting the sound clip and the llLoopSound script does not help either thanks to the prim properties. The only solution is to edit the linked prims, determine which prim is the emitter (using beacons) and then drop in a 'clear prim properties' type script to remove the audio from the prim.


As others have noted, it all comes down to how well the scripting ties together the audio and the visual of the door itself. You could even go so far as to ensure that the audio can only be heard within a pre-defined distance using scripts, without subdividing the parcel.

Door Sound Collection and Free Door Scripts


Free Full Perm Sound Library for Builders

That's not true at all, llLoopSound (and llPlaySound) certainly don't fill a whole sim with sound at full volume. In fact I imagine one reason people toss in multiple sound emitters into a large object is because on their setups the sounds fade too quickly with distance. All that is a function of the way LL implemented positional sound, which can be tweaked by twiddling in your preferences things like distance factor and rolloff factor.

There's a particular sound I'm thinking about, which may very well mostly exist as a UUID that gets passed around as part of a freebie script.

Very true about multiple closely-spaced sources with identical sounds adding to the issue, and the phase problems don't help either.

Sorry, I should have been more specific... I did not mean that either llLoopSound or llPlaySound would fill an entire sim at full volume. My point was that llLoopSound is not localized. The two functions are distinctly different on playback. The client preferences also play into it, but llLoopSound carries much further when compared to llPlaySound. At the same time llPlaySound will provide a better 'off in the distance' or nearby sound when used for certain background effects.

For Halloween I created a haunted house that got some great reviews and feedback... I was very careful to focus on the sounds because that was a huge part of the immersive experience. So I had to find just the right door creaks, haunting sounds, collision sounds... hugely important... a number of people commented on the sounds. In fact I refused to let my best friend, who normally plays SL with sound off, go through the haunted house until he was sure to have sound available.

Sound is very important to me and I appreciate a good door opening/closing sound. But 80% of the doors seem to use the same sound found in the same freebie script. A big industrial door with that basic sound found everywhere... doesn't sound right.

Door noises are important and good when used in doors but I don't like them in books.

....but book noises would be perfect, then!

I'd like book noises in doors, too, I think.