Major Tom
Member
As the title suggests, all of the SFX and music files have had their loudness reduced by 15 decibels.
I originally posted this for Schtserv and here it is on Ephinea for any of your knuckledraggers who still happen to be banging rocks together on Windows XP without the advantages of technological wonders such as application-specific volume control.
Coincidentally, all custom music packs potentially benefit as well because they no longer have to compete with the loudness of the sound effects. Where you would typically have to use dynamic range compression to prevent clipping on tracks it may no longer be necessary.
Known issues:
Multistream OGGs - Some OGGs (basically all of the environmental music, outside of towns/shops etc) have multiple streams so PSO can dynamically change music. They also happen to be laborious to create as it was a seldom used feature of the OGG spec and there aren't any easy ways to edit them (that I know of). The tracks in this pack are not multistreamed and therefore may skip or loop in odd ways during gameplay. Sorry.
Clicks/squeaks in SFX - PSO will not accept sounds of a different filesize than the originals. Any changes, including loudness, will change the fielsize ever so slightly. The PAC Manager that extracts them to WAV files automatically pads them with data when importing them back into PACs, which may manifest as audible clicks etc. There is nothing that can be done about this as far as I know.
OGG Overwrites - Some OGGs were overwrittten by the patch server on SCHTHACK, the same may be true here assuming it is default server behavior.
Instructions: OGGs are located in Program Files\PSOBB Folder\data\ogg. Sound effects are located in \data\sound. Extract the respective package to these folders and overwrite originals. I recommend making a new folder at those locations and copying your original files to them before extracting and overwriting.
OGG
SFX
Combined ZIP
I originally posted this for Schtserv and here it is on Ephinea for any of your knuckledraggers who still happen to be banging rocks together on Windows XP without the advantages of technological wonders such as application-specific volume control.
Coincidentally, all custom music packs potentially benefit as well because they no longer have to compete with the loudness of the sound effects. Where you would typically have to use dynamic range compression to prevent clipping on tracks it may no longer be necessary.
Known issues:
Multistream OGGs - Some OGGs (basically all of the environmental music, outside of towns/shops etc) have multiple streams so PSO can dynamically change music. They also happen to be laborious to create as it was a seldom used feature of the OGG spec and there aren't any easy ways to edit them (that I know of). The tracks in this pack are not multistreamed and therefore may skip or loop in odd ways during gameplay. Sorry.
Clicks/squeaks in SFX - PSO will not accept sounds of a different filesize than the originals. Any changes, including loudness, will change the fielsize ever so slightly. The PAC Manager that extracts them to WAV files automatically pads them with data when importing them back into PACs, which may manifest as audible clicks etc. There is nothing that can be done about this as far as I know.
OGG Overwrites - Some OGGs were overwrittten by the patch server on SCHTHACK, the same may be true here assuming it is default server behavior.
Instructions: OGGs are located in Program Files\PSOBB Folder\data\ogg. Sound effects are located in \data\sound. Extract the respective package to these folders and overwrite originals. I recommend making a new folder at those locations and copying your original files to them before extracting and overwriting.
OGG
SFX
Combined ZIP
