Problems with sound packs Created 9 years ago2015-04-30 12:35:33 UTC by Wolfenstein97

Hey guys, have you ever used the "HL Overhaul pack" ? - http://www.moddb.com/mods/half-life-overhaul-pack

...or the "Diamond pack" ? - http://www.moddb.com/mods/diamond-half-life-final

they both come with lots of custom in-game sounds, witch seams fine and all, but instead, most of the time they end up cutting each other off and even stopping npc dialog, or even, stoping most sounds from playing, to the point where I can't even hear my own gun shots / fpptsteps, at points like that only ambient sounds seem to play, well, that, and music... HELP !

Thanks in advance

It could possibly be that the sounds are formatted/sampled the wrong way. For instance, Half-Life only have support for 8-bit sounds sampled at either 11025hz or 440something hz.
Some of the new sounds may use higher quality bitrates and samplings that Half-Life doesn't support.

In that case, how can I properly convert the sounds so that they sound as good as they can without braking things ? / witch program to use and what settings ?

Well, probably any sound editor that can save 8-bit files and allow resampling should work. Wich should be almost every audio editor available.
Just load up a sound file, set it's sample rate to 11025hz, then re-save it as a 8-bit wav file.

hm, I just checked the "making custom sounds" tutorial for hl1, it says you can also use 16 bit @ 22khz, is that true? also, an idea for a program that does a batch operation with these ? I mean we're talking like, 300 sounds or so, if I do it one by one I'll be here all weekend, lol

GoldWave is a good tool

But it's paid. And not everyone have the availability to pay for stuff via their computers. But there are multiple good free audio editors on the internet.

well, let's just say I have my own ways, so, got a registerd copy of goldwave 6.10, though, what are the right settings for the batch processing window ? there's PCM, signd and unsigned / microsoft pcm, or whatever, so many of them, how do I do it right ? - I'm a complete noob when it comes to sound stuff, so try and go easy on me here

Wolfenstein97
You just can check original HL sounds for their properties.

For example, NPCs' speeches and environment sounds are something like that:

Format : Wave

Audio
Format : PCM
Format settings, Endianness : Little
Format settings, Sign : Unsigned
Codec ID : 1
Bit rate mode : Constant
Bit rate : 88.2 Kbps
Channel(s) : 1 channel
Sampling rate : 11.025 KHz
Bit depth : 8 bits

Weapons' sounds like that:

Format : Wave

Audio
Format : PCM
Format settings, Endianness : Little
Format settings, Sign : Unsigned
Codec ID : 1
Bit rate mode : Constant
Bit rate : 176.4 Kbps
Channel(s) : 1 channel
Sampling rate : 22.05 KHz
Bit depth : 8 bits

For 100% compatibility sounds should be mono 8-bit PCMs with sampling rate of 11.025 KHz or 22.05 KHz. The problem is that if you convert quality WAVs in low bitrate, they will often sound too bad. Also, I played a lot with Overhaul Pack (as its' author) and didn't have any significant problems with it. Maybe you are using WON version of Half-Life? It has outdated sound processing module, that can be a cause of all those problems. Steam version of Half-Life or Xash3D should deal with those sounds fine. At least until you don't try to use stereo WAVs (which are really causing sample conversion problem) or sounds with high bitrates for NPCs' speeches (they are causing lipsync problem).

@Qwertyus - so if I were to take every single custom sound I'd ever use and convert it to 22050kHz with the settings mentioned everything thing would be fine, right ? - also, I'm using the steam version, no problems you say - go to c3a2d, after a while, see if you can hear anything else besides the ambient sound of the teleporter - you won't even be able to hear your own footsteps, let alone gun shots... - while I will admit that Xash3D fixes those problems, (well, I know this should be a new topic all together, but) as far as I know it doesn't support custom detailed textures, (from mods like, Half-Life: Gold Single Player) and getting that texture pack to work seems impossible, we're talking thousands of files you might have to rename, and some of them have to be duplicated, and, just... I can't seem to do it right, plus it seems as if it was made only with steam support in mind (no WON based stuff, like Xash), so, any other good texture packs that work ok under xash ? - also, since we're talking WON stuff, what would be the best settings for ripping the cd soundtracks at the highest quality while getting them to play fine under xash, for a program like, say, "Exact Audio Copy" ?

Some sounds have cue points to make a proper sound loop for them. If you want to convert sounds you should take care, that cue points won't to be deleted in conversion. GoldWave should be fine for this, as I can remember. In most cases, I think, it should be enough to convert 16-bit wavs to 8-bit. At least, console usually spams about problems with 16-bit sounds.

For example, for c3a2d it spams about blip1.wav. Just detele it from the pack, or convert to 8 bit and all will be fine. So you don't need to convert all sounds, maybe only few.

What about MP3s, I'm using best quality tracks - in 320 kbps. For Xash3D you can even use uncompressed PCM WAVs of best quality. You just need to edit media\cdaudio.txt to smth like this:
blank
Half-Life01.wav
Prospero01.wav
Half-Life12.wav
Half-Life07.wav
Half-Life10.wav
Suspense01.wav
Suspense03.wav
Half-Life09.wav
Half-Life02.wav
Half-Life13.wav
Half-Life04.wav
Half-Life15.wav
Half-Life14.wav
Half-Life16.wav
Suspense02.wav
Half-Life03.wav
Half-Life08.wav
Prospero02.wav
Half-Life05.wav
Prospero04.wav
Half-Life11.wav
Half-Life06.wav
Prospero03.wav
Half-Life17.wav
Prospero05.wav
Suspense05.wav
Suspense07.wav