Speech and Sound

For collaboration between the different artists creating music and sound for vegastrike.
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zaydana
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Post by zaydana »

sounds interesting. thanks for bumping the thread too :)

I found klauss' version of mission recently and i've been getting into music a bit again. I'll upload klauss' version for everybody to hear in a bit, and start working maybe on salad and premonition
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Post by zaydana »

ok, http://vegastrike.sf.net/music/mission_interpreted.ogg ... klauss' interpretation of mission. If theres not much left to it, we could already put it in as flight music.
fizze
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Post by fizze »

right, heres some mp3's.
I used the internal mic of my H320, coz I just wanted to try it out. quality isnt really astounding, but i think its suitable for some background noise. (and thats what it actually is ;))

http://belouve.thejediacademy.net/VOICE060.MP3
and
http://belouve.thejediacademy.net/VOICE063.MP3
Last edited by fizze on Tue Aug 09, 2005 7:21 am, edited 1 time in total.
chuck_starchaser
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Thanks, fizze! Spiritplumber will be happy; she's been wanting noise backgrounds for bars in WCU. I can't listen to the mp3's right now but I'll check them out later.
EDIT:
Was trying to save the files, but the links don't work.
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Post by klauss »

I guess it's time to work on multilayer music. It's not hard, I'll come up with something soon (just fire up two or more soundservers, but I'm not sure what amount of trouble that could bring to linux folks which are already having trouble with multiple sound apps)

Also, I already tried mission ingame, and it's perfect. It fits like a pair of handcrafted gloves.

Good to hear you're back into music, Zay.
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Post by charlieg »

klauss wrote:(just fire up two or more soundservers, but I'm not sure what amount of trouble that could bring to linux folks which are already having trouble with multiple sound apps)
Works fine if you set your sound up right:
http://alsa.opensrc.org/index.php?page=DmixPlugin
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Post by fizze »

chuck_starchaser wrote:Thanks, fizze! Spiritplumber will be happy; she's been wanting noise backgrounds for bars in WCU. I can't listen to the mp3's right now but I'll check them out later.
EDIT:
Was trying to save the files, but the links don't work.
eek, I must've made a spelling mistake there. will be fixing it later today.


edit:
fixed already

http://belouve.thejediacademy.net/VOICE060.MP3
and
http://belouve.thejediacademy.net/VOICE063.MP3
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Indeed, this can be worked with; thanks fizze! Keep them coming, friend.
Shopping mall background would be good for commerce bases. Industrial noise would be good for ship repairs and upgrades; but must not be manufacturing type noise, with like repetitive machinery; rather random noises, like from a bodyshop.

WCU is first in line; I'll edit the files first and post cleaned up versions in my server; then I'll make a mix for WCU. I'm not sure about adding reverb, since there seems to be enough reverbe in them naturally....

Klauss, any FFT magic you have in mind, prior to editing?
I'm thinking of making two loops of different lenghts, with the best parts of each file. Complex factor feedbacks might be good to try on this... ;-)
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Post by fizze »

i got one more file which is like 70 secs in length, if you want it..... ;)

ye well, seeing as its just used as bg "noise" kinda, and the internal mic is enough, I can ponder around and record lots of stuff..... hehehe

I hardly leave my house w/o my mp3 player :)
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Post by klauss »

Just a little tip:

Set the MP3 quality as high as possible. It is background noise, but as a master it should have the highest quality possible (of course, taking into account recording time, etc, etc...). Personally, I don't like 128kbits, I prefer, at least, 192.

For cleaning it up, I'm sure I have ideas. But I'll have to listen to the files first, at home. At work, I have only a loussy speaker which doesn't let me hear anything but burping sounds :x
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Post by Wisq »

I was reading this thread from top to bottom today, and the "layered" audio concept sounds good. But if I may, the first thing I thought of when I began reading this thread: Has anyone here played Dungeon Keeper 2?

DK2 had perhaps the best music system I've ever seen in a game. It could ratchet the music up to epic proportions, bring it up and down based on the intensity of combat, etc., but as a player, I almost never actually noticed. It was combat mood music at its best: Perfect style, yet completely unobtrusive. (I seem to recall the most powerful music was only pulled out when the player called down a giant uncontrollable demon that would wade into the battle, destroying anything and everything until the timer ran out.)

Later, when I used an XMMS plugin to extract the music, it was split into four tracks or so for each tune. But playing each tune, I found it was interspersed with clicks every few bars. It finally dawned on me: They weren't just changing tracks when combat came around, they were switching from one to another in mid-tune, a sort of "segmented music". Those clicks were possible transition points, and each subsequent track added a few extra instruments, increased the emphasis somewhere, etc.

That means it wouldn't change tunes, i.e. start at the beginning of a track; rather, it might play the intro of the level 1 tune for a bit, then a few bars from the level 2, then back to the middle of the level 1 tune, then maybe 2, 3, even 4, then slowly taper back off, backing out into 3, 2, 1, and eventually finishing the tune with a proper exit. The proposed layered system is similar, but from what I understand, they're talking about songs that can transition into each other; I'm referring to songs that essentially are each other, except with different levels of intensity, ready to be called upon in mid-tune.

As I recall, the base-level songs were probably designed to be played relatively end-to-end -- extremely ambient, designed not to bother the player at all, but ready to increase. (Actually, I think the lowest level was just silence, plus various ambient dungeon noises.) But once it gets into the higher modes, I doubt it would actually exit the song; it probably loops (seamlessly) until the battle's over, though I haven't played it for a while.

Anyway, just tossing out the "segmented" idea. It may be too difficult to pull off, given the styles of music we're after and the tools available, but it's still one of the best music systems I've ever played under.

On a different note, after getting tired of the same music over and over, I went through the entire collection of songs by the Precursors, a music mixing project for the Ur-Quan Masters (UQM), the excellent fan-based continuation of Star Control 2 once the source code was opened. I added every song to the most appropriate music category playlist, and I've found they work great.

Maybe it's just a question of different tastes, or maybe I'm just too big a Star Control 2 fan for my own good, but I found (for example) their 10-minute "outer space" music to be great for setting the mood in space flight, and their "starbase" main menu song great for visiting bases. I don't know what the license terms on their tracks are, or whether anyone would be interested in using them, but I'm just suggesting more what I consider "space music" -- less of the perky synth music, more of the low ambient, almost eerie music. But again, that's just my taste...

I'll say one thing more, though: I definitely had enough of the "alienrockelectro" track, since I had several factions assaulting me at every jump point. ;) Not a bad track, just, I was hearing it all the time and it was starting to grate on me. :)

Finally, I think it's been mentioned now and then, but I think Half-Life is the perfect example of how using silence a lot can dramatically enhance the value of the music when that time comes. I'm not saying space should be a silent, oppressive place -- believe me, I was eagar to get my music working after playing in silence for a while. But I'm just tossing in my vote for occasional breaks of silence, preferably going straight into combat music (or back into space music if the silence becomes too long).
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Post by zaydana »

yeah, about the music from dungeon keeper 2: that is very similar to the original idea we had for the new music. Its also quite similar to the music system in homeworld. Anyhow, we sorta scrapped that cos it was waaay to much work for just me to do, and it would also make it much harder to contribute to later on. But, as Klauss said, the support shuld still be there for it in the soundserver, even if its not used.

When my music is actually being written ;) (i still gotta find time for it), I am going to try and make a few droney tracks which are a lot of boring old soud effects and stuff like that. _Very_ low profile. I think thats the type of thing you are talking about? Also, if possible, i'd make a lot of different intensity levels, but once agian, it is a thing about time. It takes a long time for one person to write hours worth of decent music in his spare time.

Anyhow, good to hear your ideas :)
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Post by fizze »

klauss wrote:Just a little tip:

Set the MP3 quality as high as possible. It is background noise, but as a master it should have the highest quality possible (of course, taking into account recording time, etc, etc...). Personally, I don't like 128kbits, I prefer, at least, 192.

For cleaning it up, I'm sure I have ideas. But I'll have to listen to the files first, at home. At work, I have only a loussy speaker which doesn't let me hear anything but burping sounds :x

well, I second that, but bare in mind that the mic that this was recorded with is a crappy mic intended for voice notes and stuff.
in other words: it sucks. ;)
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Post by zaydana »

yeah... the reason for it is kinda that we want quality crapness if you get what i mean :) For some reason it just works like that. Go figure.
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Because distortion is a different *kind* of crapness, and it sounds very bad.
Specially for non-musical mixtures of sounds from many sources, like the murmur of a crowd, where distortion can add intermodulation components.
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Post by fizze »

haha, yeah. but remember, this is a free (as in beer) project. so dont expect too much ;)
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Post by klauss »

Kind of what chuck said.
I have tools that can make a crappy mic sound quite good, but there's nothing that can fix what MP3 does to the sound. So, if you keep MP3 distortion low, I can later process the sound and make it sound much better, even through the crappy mic.
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Post by zaydana »

or you could send it to us in .ogg if possible. That way theres gonna be a lot less distortion in the sound. .ogg is generaly a lot nicer on the ear from my (somewhat limited) experience
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Post by klauss »

But if he record it with an MP3 encoder, sending an OGG would imply transcoding, which induces even more distortion. Nah... I prefer the original... just make it as good an original as possible.
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Post by zaydana »

woops, didn't see the mp3 player part :S srry.
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Post by fizze »

well, it can record in .wav only (at least until theres rockbox for this gem)
anyway, as a background loop, I still think its fair enough.
I'll pump up bitrate though, for my future recording endavours (given i have the disk space)

so long
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Well, .wav is perfect; just upload it like that; don't compress it at all. Let us do the compressing *after* we work with it. If upload size is a problem I got space; can give you an ftp account.
(Note: MP3 and OGG are compression algorithms specialized for music (and single voice speech, for instance); they are terribly distortive, by comparison, when used for compression of non-musical "noise".)
Maybe you can zip or gzip the .wav file to get it somewhat smaller.
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Post by klauss »

AC3 (dolby digital) is almost specifically designed for noise (movies do have a lot of it). A stereo AC3 file at 192kbps sounds very good with noises and stuff, although poor with music. At 256kbps, the difference is minimal (although existent).
There are free AC3 encoders out there, although not overly efficient.
If you can, WAV is the way.

(Forgive us for our nitpickiness - it's in our nature)
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Post by fizze »

fizze wrote:well, it can record in .wav only (at least until theres rockbox for this gem)
anyway, as a background loop, I still think its fair enough.
I'll pump up bitrate though, for my future recording endavours (given i have the disk space)

so long
erm, ok. should have drunk more beer when I wrote that. lol.

it can only record in .MP3, of course.
when there's rockbox for this piece, it might be capable of more.
thats the catch. :roll:
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Doh! Okay, if it has any quality settings, like sampling rate and bit rate, just max them out. But no "noise filters" or AGC; if you can turn any such things off, so much the better, as it's better to filter out unwanted things and normalize level, post-processing. The two files do sound a little "choppy", wich is probably the mp3 compression, as it keeps changing spectral bit distrubution. That's mp3's problem with noise: It can't decide how to distribute bits. Good news is, we can add reverb, and that will make it sound like the choppiness is part of the voices.
Of course, we are going to re-compress the final thing with ogg, but if klauss agrees, I think the best way to do it will be to find the strongest spectral content areas, and reinforce those and filter down the rest, so as to pre-bias the compression (make it easier for it).
Other than that, keep going at it; even if it's just more crowds; we could use a different crowd sound for the bar at each planet type, so it doesn't get monotonous. Same thing for upgrades room. Some relatively quite place with the sound of some people walking, could be good for the ship dealer. For vegastrike we'd need some kind of large and spacious indoor sound for the launch platform. Also the commodities room in VS looks like the new york stock exchange; but there must be some place were people discuss things loudly around where you live... If not, a BINGO club could do. :)
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