How do sounds work exactly? Trying to solve a problem (video)

[tg626]

Here, watch and wait for the Southern Pacific box cars to pass - notice the preceding cars make a clicky-clack, whereas the SP boxes go BOOM as the trucks pass over the joint.



Thing is, they have all been setup for Krellnut's Sounds - manually by me. But I can't for the life of me figure why the boxes go BOOM and for that matter why the tanks are silent...

[buzz456]

Who's cars are they?

[tg626]

GN Reefer Big Goat - Golden-Age-Rails.com
GN little goat, GN (Blank) Boxcar - RSC Empire Builder DLC
SP Boxcars, Gondolas - DTM Southern Pacific SD45 DLC
Tank cars - RWA tank cars and repaints from here.

I've mucked around with the .bin files so much, I can't recall if the tanks are "re-sound effected" or if they sound like that out of the box, but the SP cars had NO sounds at all and the RSC Empire Builder cars were silent too (or made VERY little sound).

The SP cars had a defined reference to "/Kuju/Audio/RailVehicles/Wagons/Wagon Sound.bin". Well, that file gets replaced by the installer for Krellnut's Freight Sounds for TS2015 and while other cars had the right sounds, these didn't. I discovered that if I put a Krellnut "Wagon Sound.bin" in the "/DTM/SD45-SP/Audio/Wagon" folder, replacing the original and then edited the rolling stock to point to IT instead of the one in the Kuju folder the sounds started working. I conclude that rolling stock in 2017 at least, doesn't like the audio .bin file to be outside it's own directory tree. (yes the path appeared to be correct)

However, while the creaking and groaning and air sounds are all there, the wheels clacking seems to be stuck making a loud bang sound instead...

I was hoping someone would know where those sounds come from.

BTW: If there's some sort of guide to these XML tags, like a reference not a tutorial that tells you how to do one thing, I'd love a link to it. My googlefu is weak...

[BoostedFridge]

My empire builder cars sound just like yours do in the video; very quiet, and with none of the wheel defects that are the hallmark of Krellnut's sounds.

[tg626]

My empire builder cars sound just like yours do in the video; very quiet, and with none of the wheel defects that are the hallmark of Krellnut's sounds.

Sorry mate, but no they don't. That might not show off the defect sounds but I know from running them before and after they had absolutely NO sound at all after I bought the RSC Empire DLC and now of course they do have sound. Now if it matters, I bought the set about 2 days ago, so maybe I didn't get what you got.

See I made a consist of "stock" rolling stock and then all EB rolling stock to check them out. Ran it by "myself" in game, while "standing" track side. All the stock cars had lovely groaning banging and bumping, then the EB cars came along and DEAD SILENCE - the loco was far enough away I couldn't hear it at all and it was still as a tomb - like phantom cars were rushing by of some ghost train.

Oh, I should mention, when I ran the installer for krellnuts sound pack it borked my rsc empire builder freight cars, replacing the rolling stock .bin with a sound .bin so I'm guessing the file structure of that dlc must have changed since 2015. Maybe that's why?

That's what started me on manually setting them up, and anyway it's the SP cars from DTM that have the right squeeks and the wrong rail joint sounds.

[buzz456]

Lots of stuff that came from RSC didn't have any wheel sounds at all. The ones from GN have a much different sound from Wally's sound, kind of a loud rumble. Most of them I just aliased back to the Kuju sound in the bin filewhich if normally installed Krellnut sound is called from there. This just bypasses any audio file normally associated with the respective cars.

[tg626]

Right, but I found that on my system at least, it didn't work. The SP cars were directed to the Kuju files by default, and that gave me silence. It wasn't until I directed it to the LOCAL DTM/SD45-SP/Audio/imnotsure/Wagons/Wagon Sound.bin and THEN I replaced that Wagon Sound.bin with a copy of the wagon sound.bin in Krellnut's "extra bins and xmls" folder. Then it worked - except I get that BANG on the rail joints.

I didn't like the RSC rumble so I switched them out to Krellnut's sound pack and they worked fine.

So - getting back to the original question - where do the rail joint sounds come from?

Hmmm, this is interesting. An examination of Wagon Freight.xml from the Krellnut pack shows a whole load of entries referencing wav files in a non-existent "Joint Sounds" folder.

[krellnut]

Those banging sounds aren't from me. I'd guess there Great Northern sounds.

Don't worry about the joint sound entries in the XML. Without the sounds, nothing will happen or be affected by them.

[tg626]

Thanks for the info.

Meanwhile I tracked it down, it seems the bang is a sound file in the dtm/sd45-sp folder. It's the result of a tag on the rollingstock bin file <BogieAudioControlName>.

That tag directly specifies the .proxybin file to be used for sound effects.

Since I liked the RSC Empire Builder wheel sounds and the Krellnut wagon sounds, I edited that tag to point to the bogie proxybin file within the RSC/EmpireBuilder01 folder.

It worked (so far, still testing) - that obnoxious single bang for each truck (bogie) passing over a joint has been replaced with that clicky-clack sound. Updating everything is going to take some time, but I'm making progress. No worse the super detailing or otherwise correcting real model rolling stock I suppose, just no x-acto knife or fun things to sniff...

[_o_OOOO_oo-Kanawha]

No worse the super detailing or otherwise correcting real model rolling stock I suppose, just no x-acto knife or fun things to sniff...

LOL, sniffing too much toluene?

Sounds in TS are equivalent to dark voodoo, and like you found out, many providers just don't bother with them.

One thing to keep in mind when aliasing sounds etc. is that most computers' sound systems only allow a limited number of samples to be played at the same time.
So if you mix too many sounds, some will not play. There is a priority variable in every sound sample's definition in the proxyxml files, so the most important sounds should be set higher than for instance bird calls from the scenery your train is rolling through.