Stereo Zoned Ambients Need a Stereo silence.ogg Leadin Sound

[Spooks]

Most zoned ambients, when used in place of regular ambient sounds, sound considerably worse. It does not matter whether they are coming off a speaker or from the location system. I encountered this way back when working on King of Diamonds and even pointed it out on the forums, but nobody seemed to take notice. I used non-zoned ambients in KoD for this precise reason, which led to complaints about the loud popping you hear when you don't use _z ambients. Now I've come to a head when implementing location settings in my new FM and I cannot deal with the pop-in anymore. I've debugged this issue myself, leading to this discovery.

 

The leadin "silence.ogg" is needed for zoned ambients to properly fade in and out when used in the location system. Currently, this sound file is in mono format. ALL ambient sounds that we have in stereo format are currently suffering great audio quality loss when used in combination with a mono leadin.

 

The easy solution to this problem is this: convert "silence.ogg" from a mono to a stereo file. Most our (good) music is in stereo, so this will fix the issue - I tested it personally. However, just as a mono leadin will ruin a stereo sound, testing revealed that a stereo leadin also ruins a mono sound. If we're to be rigorous, there must be two silence leadin files: "silence.ogg" and "silence_stereo.ogg". In the ambience_zoned.sndshd file, the appropriate leadin must be declared depending on the type of file. I've no idea how to batch check for numbers of channels on lots of audio files, so this may prove to be arduous gruntwork.

 

Nevertheless, I highly suggest that at least the easy fix get applied for the next update. The quality gain from fixing a bunch of stereo sound is much greater than ruining a handful of mono sound.

 

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See the bugtracker report I've filed here.

 

If you want to test this yourself, I've provided a stereo "silence.ogg" for your convenience. Place it in "sound/ambient/ambience/" to override the default one. An example stereo ambient to test the change is "forest_children_z". An example mono one would be "hum_intense03_loop_z". You can immediately test the difference in sound in-game by renaming this custom "silence.ogg" to e.g. "silence_diffname.ogg" after you've placed it and typing "realoadSounds" in the console while near a speaker emitting either of those two sound shaders.

 

silence.ogg.txt

Edited May 24, 2017 by Spooks

[kingsal]

Oh man, I was just trying to figure this out the other day! Thanks Spooks!

 

I couldn't for the life of me figure out why my ambient tracks where playing at a lower sample rate. I thought it had something to do with transitioning from a mono to stereo ambient. I didn't even think to look at the silence file.

[Bikerdude]

Thanks for that Spooks, will check with the team before I got ahead and add this to the core mod.

[demagogue]

I'll crosspost this from the internal thread for the public record.

 

I'm the one that originally decided to use the silence.ogg "leadin" to stop the popping problem.

(It was actually only a guess. I was never 100% sure it stops the problem or if it's confirmation bias. The pop-in will happen or not also depending on if the incoming ambient is very loud or not at the start, and possibly other issues that I don't even know about. But I at least had rational grounds to believe leadin works the way the problem works.)

 

But anyway, all of that is aside from the main point here.

It seems spooks really figured out stereo depends on having a stereo leadin.
In that case, it should be an easy yes to allow the switch IMO.

There was no rational reason I used mono in the first place except that it was fast to make & didn't occur to me it'd be a problem.

[Spooks]

By my guesses the pop in happens only when you enter a zone for the first time or when you travel between three zones fast. The latter case is fixable by setting your 2foip spawnargs to a longer fadein/out. The former I could only guess happens because even though the sound shaders are supposed to be "precached" they still load for the first time, making them skip fadeins. Perhaps making the sound shaders consist of two files makes the system load both, skipping the fade on the silence (which doesn't cause a pop, obviously) but it still works for the song proper. Again, all conjecture.

[Bikerdude]

There was no rational reason I used mono in the first place except that it was fast to make & didn't occur to me it'd be a problem.

So just a case of replacing the silence.ogg file then..?

[Xarg]

Seems to me you'd be better off keeping the original and substituting the new one into the stereo ambients, but that'd likely be a lot more work.

[Bikerdude]

Seems to me you'd be better off keeping the original and substituting the new one into the stereo ambients, but that'd likely be a lot more work.

As I understand it, all the ambient's are stereo files - so unless silence.ogg is used with any non-ambient's its shouldn't be an issue to direct replace the file.

[Bikerdude]

Seems to me you'd be better off keeping the original and substituting the new one into the stereo ambients, but that'd likely be a lot more work.

Assuming all the ambient's are stereo files, unless silence.ogg is used with any non-ambient's its shouldn't be an issue to direct replace the file.

[demagogue]

By my guesses the pop in happens only when you enter a zone for the first time or when you travel between three zones fast. The latter case is fixable by setting your 2foip spawnargs to a longer fadein/out. The former I could only guess happens because even though the sound shaders are supposed to be "precached" they still load for the first time, making them skip fadeins. Perhaps making the sound shaders consist of two files makes the system load both, skipping the fade on the silence (which doesn't cause a pop, obviously) but it still works for the song proper. Again, all conjecture.

 

Since this issue came up again, cf. http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/18982-tdm-206/?p=414263, I'll just comment on this. The reason it happens (I thought at the time) is because, for a sound that is faded in, the way id4 set things up, the script function start_sound begins the sound at full volume, then you use a .01 second fadeout to silence, then you gradually fade it back up in volume.

 

The pop I thought was due to the fadeout coming online after start_sound already started a loud sound, so you get that blip of full volume before it fadesout. So a longer fadein would not address that issue.

 

The idea of the silent leadin was to allow the .01 second fadeout to do its work before the main sound comes online. As I said before, I don't know that that was ever actually the problem. E.g., there have been other issues with sound popping: http://bugs.thedarkmod.com/view.php?id=4148, which (the video in the first post of the attached thread) is what the original pop sounded like too AFAICR.