[MOD] Cleaned SoundClips

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Midknightprince
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Re: [MOD] Cleaned SoundClips

Post by Midknightprince »

You can hear the difference, it doesn't seem to be slowing anything down either.
Did you do the rain to ?
The rain sounds better, don't tell me what you did I want to find out the hard way, but I'm calling the rain, you did the rain
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Re: [MOD] Cleaned SoundClips

Post by Midknightprince »

Thank you for doing the horse clip-cloping !
Thank you !!!
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Re: [MOD] Cleaned SoundClips

Post by pango »

The first steps are already explained in the Tamriel Mixdown thread: I used DaggerSoundExtract to convert the original effects to .WAV format, then used Sox to do a hifi conversion to 44kHz 16bit format while at the same time adjusting volumes to match what Helegad did for Tamriel Mixdown pack.
The format conversion alone should just slightly improve the quality over direct original 11kHz 8bit playback, but it allowed further rework.

So, the next step was using Audacity to manually edit the sounds; Its noise reduction algorithm needs some interval of "silence" with just the background noise so it can analyze the noise frequencies, then can filter out noise from the whole sound with minimal damage. It usually works well, but worked great with most Daggerfall effects! Not all sounds have silences, but most of them must have went thru the same recording process (recording conditions, hardware, digital encoding), so I could use the noise signature from crickets effect on most of them. Some like daedra sounds or crowd loops have different noise signatures, for daedra sounds I managed to squeeze out some silence and duplicate it so Audacity algorithm has enough silence to extract its signature, for crowd loops I had to use an external noise signature, in both cases the results are average to meh.
Then on case-by-case I applied other editing, still with Audacity; The common remaining issue appears when the effect volume is low, residual noise gets noticeable (I even wonder if autogain was used), so I applied Studio Fadeout to make clean cuts in a few cases. For storm sounds I used low pass filter, with varying cutout frequencies (cutting more and more out as the sound is fading away). For the most difficult cases I used mixing between the original sound and a filtered clone to find the sweet spots.
For looping sounds like rain, I had to use zero-crossing clipping to remove "pop" as they loop back. Something I learned about along the ride :)

Manual editing took something like 9 hours of a very quiet Sunday afternoon (I have no noise reduction headset). That has been more exhausting that I anticipated, but now it's over, I'm proud of the result (even if it would be no match against clean native 44kHz 16bit sound effects), it improves my own DFU gameplay experience, and I learned some sound editing tricks, so it's cool.

It's interesting you mention rain sound, because now that noise is filtered away, the cleaned sound has some noticeable chirps (?) near the end, that were already in the original sound but masked by the noise. It makes it too obvious ingame that the sound is looped. That's probably the main candidate for replacement with another sound, I'm sure there has to be a nicer, longer, copyleft rain effect loop somewhere... or generated?
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Re: [MOD] Cleaned SoundClips

Post by King of Worms »

Very interresting read, thanks for those details. Lots of work done!
The thunder pausing the rain sound is a know issue I guess. Can it be repaired somehow?

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Re: [MOD] Cleaned SoundClips

Post by pango »

King of Worms wrote: Wed Jan 16, 2019 1:39 pm The thunder pausing the rain sound is a know issue I guess. Can it be repaired somehow?
I tried, tens of times, but how Components are instanciated inside Unity is still a bit too arcane for me...
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Re: [MOD] Cleaned SoundClips

Post by ByteMixer »

As a temporary fix for the thunder sound, try layering rain on top of the thunder sound for the length of the thunder track. You may need to trim the rain sound to fit, and there may or may not be a hitch as the thunder sound loads. (I'm guessing not since they're small files)

Also, for the rain loop point being audible, try either crossfading, or looping the tail of the rain through the beginning (there might be an option for that somewhere in Audacity, I don't remember, and it's been a long time since I used it) Another option zooming in very close on the wave form and finding a spot both at the beginning and end where the wave crosses the center line, or 0dB, and trim the track so the beginning and end are at that point. You may need a very slight fade-in/fade-out curve for a smooth loop.

I didn't hear a chirp or spike (like what happens when you suddenly jump from one value to another almost like a tangent wave) just a slight gain reduction from the fade in/out.

I can try to take a look at it myself as well, and see if I can do something with it for a smoother rain experience. :)

Edit:
Actually, I just took a look at the rain file, and all I did was adjust the fade-in and fade-out to be a bit shorter time. At least that sound should loop pretty seamlessly now. I'll put it up on my drive so you can take a look at it and try it out. https://drive.google.com/open?id=1iaqk4 ... Fxo5wmoy3a FWIW, the headphones I use are a pair of AKG 240s, which are semi-open (slightly better for ballpark mixing) I just got back from rehearsal, and it's late, so I can't use my speakers right now to double check, but headphones are usually better to check for small detailed issues anyway (like reverb tails and the like)


And now that I think about it, the thunder sound is used in the intro, and a few other places without rain.....so layering rain with it is probably not a good solution.
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Re: [MOD] Cleaned SoundClips

Post by King of Worms »

ByteMixer wrote: Thu Jan 17, 2019 5:03 am And now that I think about it, the thunder sound is used in the intro, and a few other places without rain.....so layering rain with it is probably not a good solution.
In the intro the sound is played from the video, so altering the game sounds will not change it.
I think layering the rain in the thunder sounds might a good solution for now.

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Re: [MOD] Cleaned SoundClips

Post by pango »

Hi ByteMixer,
ByteMixer wrote: Thu Jan 17, 2019 5:03 am As a temporary fix for the thunder sound, try layering rain on top of the thunder sound for the length of the thunder track.
That won't work right, thunder sounds are not played back-to-back, there's random silences between plays. The code just need to be changed to play events and loops at the same time, using two Unity AudioSource. Tried to change the code, but I don't get what I want. I even wonder if the code I'm modifying is really executed, because debugging code I added there does nothing, even when I'm running DFU without any mod that could have overridden by code :o
ByteMixer wrote: Thu Jan 17, 2019 5:03 am Also, for the rain loop point being audible, try either crossfading, or looping the tail of the rain through the beginning
I don't think it's audible, I should have fixed that in 1.2 with just zero-crossing cuts. But there's a feature in the rain loop that makes it obvious it's looped; Probably because the water was falling into a hard surface (shower? :D) I would prefer the rain sound to be more uniform (and if possible longer too).
ByteMixer wrote: Thu Jan 17, 2019 5:03 am And now that I think about it, the thunder sound is used in the intro, and a few other places without rain.....so layering rain with it is probably not a good solution.
As KoW already said, the intro is a video... They reused one of the thunder soundclip for its sound track, but they're separate things.
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Re: [MOD] Cleaned SoundClips

Post by ByteMixer »

Gotcha, I see what you were saying.

Hmm, well, there are methods to lengthen the rain sound. You can invert and/or reverse the wave form of the clip, and append them to the end of the sound clip to lengthen the track in a less structured way. It would seem a little less looped that way, and you'd have a longer raining sound as well.

Another (but much more time consuming method) would be to zoom in close, create split points at all spots where the wave crosses zero, and copy/recombine those audio slices into more non-uniform rain sounds. Might need to crossfade the slices for smoothness, but it might be doable, at least in theory.
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Re: [MOD] Cleaned SoundClips

Post by pango »

I see. I'm not sure it's worth the trouble (compared to pick another free rain sound), but that can be attempted...

I found out why my code changes didn't have any effect! Compiler was silently failing on my changes, and the game was always running using the last version that worked :(
Anyway, got some patch with thunder and rain, but it may require some improvements before it's ready...
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