SCI Digital Sound Packs

[gumby]

I've put together a couple of digital sound packs.  I've uploaded them as game submissions (Cloudee, I'm not sure if the 2nd pack uploaded or not).  I've also added them to the SCI wiki:

http://sci.sierrahelp.com/download.php?file=Files/Gumby/SCIDigitalSoundPack1-Doors.zip
http://sci.sierrahelp.com/download.php?file=Files/Gumby/SCIDigitalSoundPack2-Animals.zip

The first pack has 20 different door sounds, the second almost 50 animal sounds.  They can be used with the SNDBLAST.DRV sound driver.  I also included the final wav files in case people would like to manipulate the file even further (remove noise, support looping, etc).

Here's how I created the sounds:
1)  Found some public domain WAV sound files (in some cases MP3s which I then converted to WAVs using Audacity)
2)  Converted the WAV files to the correct format using SoX (Sound eXchange).  They need to be 8 bit, mono & under 64K.  Here's the command line I used:

Code: [Select]

sox inputfile.wav -V -b 8 -c 1 --norm=0 -r 44100 output.wav
Sometimes it was necessary to normalize the sound & avoid clipping with --norm=-1.  Usually I left off the -r (rate) option until I needed it and would set it to a lower sample rate to get the file size under 64K.  I never dropped it below a value of 11025 (1/4 quality of audio CDs).
3)  Created an empty sound resource in Anvil
4)  Imported empty sound resource into Soundbox & saved it, so now we have a sound resource file appropriate for playing in a SCI game (albeit completely empty)
5)  Added the wav file to the empty sound resource with AddWav:

Code: [Select]

AddWav.exe sound.000 sound.wav
Where the sound.000 is the empty sound resource & sound.wav is our prepared wav file.

[Collector]

You should be able to modify the WAV with Audacity, but sox as a command line tool might be a nice addition to the Sound Utilities. I had not thought about batch processing for AddWav, but I could have it copy the blank SOUND file and append it for each WAV. That way a folder of WAVs could be processed all at once. I wish  that AddWav could output messages to a file. That way I could  have the GUI check for success of each one before starting the next. I guess I could have it check the file size to be sure it was larger than the blank SOUND file for error checking. If it fails, the file should remain unchanged.

[gumby]

Collector, if you are to go this route with AddWav, I'd recommend on looping each file with a smaller and smaller sample rate until the file is under the 64K limit.  I spent a lot of time making multiple passes at files for this very reason.

Try this for redirecting error output (note the 2):
addwav.exe sound.000 bigsound.wav 2> error.log

This worked for me.

[Collector]

That worked. What does the 2 denote? I had never heard of it.

I have most of the batch processing code worked out. You will be able to add files singly or in groups either by browsing or dragging and dropping. If a folder, it will read all of the files in the folder with the proper extension and add them to the list. You will be able to remove an item or clear the entire list from a button or context menu. As with the individual processing, it will automatically rename the out file if a file with that name already exists in the folder. I just need to insert some code to have the browse not add any files that are already in the list and it will be ready for testing.

If adding the "2" to the logging works with the other tools, I'll add the error messages to the GUI for all of the Sound Utilities command line tools.

[gumby]

(2) is STDERR, but obviously that will only work if the developer caused the app to exit with a STDERR message.

Note that you can also use STDIN (0) and STDOUT (1) as other options.

Here is where I found the info: http://ss64.com/nt/syntax-redirection.html