Making sounds louder?

I recently purchased some land, and was hoping to make a clock tower on it, complete with chime. However, the loudest I can make it play, it's still not audible from halfway across the space I own. I've been told stories of people who play sounds or songs very loudly - Granted, for griefing or annoyance reasons - and was wondering how it was done, since the volume caps out at 1.

Just have multiple prims at every corner of your land and tied together with listeners. Set them to all sound off at once.

Sound volume in SL is a little tricky. The "Volume" parameter that we get to play with in llPlaySound seems to actually change the rate of "falloff" of the sound's volume. The higher the number, the further away the sound can theoretically be heard. In other words, the lower the number, the quieter the sound will hear to someone standing exactly the same distance away.

The other thing that affects the volume of a sound clip in SL is the volume of the clip itself. If you have a full-volume sound clip played at 1.0 volume, it can be heard at least half a sim away, which is kind of a pain for neighbors of yours that don't want to hear your clock.

To make your sound audible, you should load it up in a sound editor and "normalize" it to a volume of about 0.9, so that the sound file's volume is just about as loud as it can be without clipping. Then in SL, play the sound at around 0.7 or 0.8 so that it's audible where you want to hear it, but doesn't cover a huge portion of the sim.

Alright, thanks for the info. Any suggestions on what program would be good to do this?

Audacity is functional and free, although the interface can be a bit of a pain at times.

Putting prims in the corners will not work, because unless you're standing equidistant from each prim (highly unlikely) you're going to get an echo, or delay. The max a sound can be played is 1, but that just plays the file at the highest gain it was recorded at. If the sound you are playing is not going far enough, even at a setting of 1, edit the sound and increase the gain. When you're done, it should play louder in windows at the same volume level as before the editing. Then reupload the new, higher gain sound, and it will play louder. I make clocks myself, and although I didnt have that issue (my chime sounds can be heard anywhere on my land, and beyond), I have had several clocks rezzed and at the top of the hour, you would hear several clocks dinging slightly off, so forget prim "speakers" as they will not work all that well.

Another problem to note is that people don't really have their audio volume turned up very high. I've created what I consider to be loud, fully normalized without clipping sounds, played them at 1.0 volume, and could hardly hear them beyond about 20-30m away. However, I have my sound volume set fairly low normally.

Some of it is the way sound in SL works, but it seems this is also a fairly common part of the problem as well.