Did Hell Just Freeze Over?

[pakmannen]

Well almost. Got some new sounds anyway.

eerie01_loop straightforward loop

eerie02_loop another one

eerie03_loop aand another one

eerie04_loop one more to go!

eerie05_loop finito!

 

water_drips03_loop From the independent recource previously mentioned

water_ocean05_loop Experiment. A buzzing sound fading in and out. Pretty convincing!

[Dram]

Not bad at all

 

Though I don't really get the link with hell and freezing over but whatever

[Darkness_Falls]

I could see these as usable. Good job! It's hard to muster up any comments in the sound section, isn't it?

[pakmannen]

Heh, yeah, it's tough. Schatten and Sax seems to be out of town or something. Anyway thanks.

 

@Dram: I haven't actually posted any ambients for, well, a year and a half or something like that. So it was quite an event!

[Dram]

@Dram: I haven't actually posted any ambients for, well, a year and a half or something like that. So it was quite an event!

 

Ahh! that explains it

[Domarius]

Music is a very arbitrary artform.

 

So as long as it sounds "good" and people "like it", and there's a nice variety, that's all that matters.

 

After that, its up to people to use them in interesting ways in their map.

 

I guess it might help to have certain scenarios in mind to make sure things are potentially covered - pagan areas, hammerite areas, haunted areas...

 

 

 

Okay enough waffling, now for feedback.

 

These are really cool.

 

Pak, in all the eerie ones except 2, I can hear the tiniest "click" at the loop; the zero crossings aren't quite perfect.

 

water_drips03_loop - what do you think about the first few loud drop sounds? A bit melodic? That would stand out to me, and get annoying every time it repeated. The first 3 - blip(low)-blip(high)...bloop

It's like making textures I guess, avoiding small things that stand out too much to minimise people noticing patterns.

 

 

Hey regarding eerie loops - Have you thought about doing one that's meant to be used "at the center of all undead", like the most horribly conceivable place you should never be in.

 

Do you know the one from T2... I hope you've played Calendra's Legacy, cause that's the only place I can remember hearing it vividly, but I know its in T2, I think maybe one of the pagan areas. Anyway in Calendra's Legacy its (spoiler) underneath the church in the second mission, where Alcandor is at that green pit with the green smoke, making the zombies, and you really get the feeling you're in the center of all evil and undead and you really shouldn't be there, it sounds like whales, really muffled and echoing... used in the right scenario, its really really creepy.

 

There's another one that can also be used this way but I can't describe it or remember where it's from. I should install T2 so I can find them and show you what I'm talking about.

 

eerie 1 could be this sort of thing I think.

[Schatten]

Good work, pak!

 

I have the pops, too. Make sure your baseline is actually zero, if the waveform swings around any other value you get pops even though the loop joins smoothly.

[Domarius]

Ah interesting, I didn't know that! I always wondered why they had to cross at zero. That's only when looping though, and not when merging two sounds end to end in one file?

[Darkness_Falls]

Not sure what you mean by making the baseline be zero, but next time I fire up my audio program, I'll try to figure it out. There's probably a center-point zero somewhere that the wavelengths jump above and below on. With this post, I'm at post #1998. Wow! 2 away from 2000... huh.

[Domarius]

Yeah there is, and every sound app I've seen, marks this with a faint line through the middle. It's where things go when you get total silence.

[Schatten]

Ah, sorry, I should have clearified. This has to do with the format of digital audio, and is best explained with a WAV file. OGGs and MP3s have similar problems, but complicate matters by the compression.

 

Basically, what you see when you open an 8bit mono wav file with a hex editor are the dots of the sound graph, one byte per dot. These determine the current amplitude of the sound wave; this means in effect that an 8bit wav can take on 256 possible values, or from -127 to +127. Now, these phantom pops happen when the wave doesn't "swing" around the 0 value (x-axis), and the software (plugin, dll, whatever) resets after playing through the whole wav, which it usually also does if it's set to repeat the sound.

 

I've found that getting rid of an y-axis shift of the waveform is a pain in the ass, as most editing software doesn't offer the option of an y-offset (a shame, because implementation would be incredibly easy). I try to avoid this effect altogether by running an oscilloscope during master stage.

 

Btw, most prominently this effect occurs for me while using reverb with a medium room depth. You can counteract somewhat by changing the pulse-width of either the sound itself or some other synth - obviously, having a synth with an extreme PW all by itself is just causing the effect as well.

 

A somewhat dirty but sometimes the only possible alternative is to use a compressor.

[Domarius]

I think I get what you're saying.

 

The software we used at uni had the capability to shift everything down or up so that you could set the baseline yourself. I'll try and get the name for you.

 

Actually they kept throwing around the name "Pro Tools" - I thought it was a term, but maybe it WAS the name of the software.

http://www.digidesign.com/ptfree/

I found that, and apparently its free for download now for some reason?

[Gildoran]

I can't remember, but I think Audacity (which is free) has a function to center the wave around 0.

[Domarius]

I'm just glad the typo was corrected in the thread title. That was driving me nuts.

[pakmannen]

I'm just glad the typo was corrected in the thread title. That was driving me nuts.

Sorry about that, had been up waay to long when I posted the thread.

 

Anyway, I'm back where I've got my sound apps, so I will fix the loops as soon as possible. Thanks for the explanation Schatt, I had noticed the thing with the baseline, but didn't understand why it was a problem.

[Schatten]

You're welcome! If you're still using Buzz, I recommend placing a Visualizer just before the Master, after the Mixer, if you use one. I use the Joe Smurf VUMeter, which offers a nice stereo overview, a spectrum, and an osc.

[pakmannen]

Hey, I found an offset effect (y-axis) in Goldwave, but since I can't figure out exactly how much I need to offset, I don't see how this is of any help..?

 

Haven't got Buzz up and running on this machine yet, these are all done in Cubase. I'll see if there's an offset option there as well.

[saxmeister]

Hey Pak-

 

The SFX sound great! It's good to hear your posts again.

 

eerie03_loop.ogg and eerie04_loop.ogg make me start looking behind me! Creepy stuff!

 

The only suggestions I might have is to notch some of the high parts out of eerie04_loop.ogg just a bit. It sounds a little loud on the high end and might cover up some of the other sounds in the mix. Just a thought..... doesn't have to be changed though.

 

eerie05_loop.ogg and eerie01_loop.ogg sound like something straight out of the original Thief series. Good work!!!! They are perfect!

 

-Sax