Tips on Creating Sound Sets?

[Tonga]

Hey everyone,

as many of you will know, the new BTCC season 2011 has started last weekend at Brands Hatch. After already having updated some tracks for personal use (Donington, Rockingham, Knockhill) I am currently working on two things, the first being an accurate heightmap for Brands Hatch and the second being an own sound set for BTCC touring cars.
Due to the new NGTC regulations most teams are now running on new turbo-charged engines which produce a rather different sound from what one was still used to just a year ago.

On YouTube I found two nice videos which could be suitable to extract some engine sounds:





Extracting the sounds is easy, cutting them is a bit harder, but the hardest thing for me is the fact that the ingame-sound is always pretty different from what I had edited and sampled. Either there is almost no bass at all, so no real dark and noisy grumbling in the sounds, OR there is way too much of it - resulting in a complete mess for the ears. I have already experimented with different samples that I collected from the videos and it seems that the new NGTC engine sounds are a bit too hard for the GR sound engine.
I thought I'd share the links to the videos, just in case anyone else wants to give it a try.

Do you have any special tips concerning GR sound design?
I already saw the thread on how sounds seem to be handled now in v1.10 but I there's way more happening to the sounds than just an ordinary conversion and some pitching...

[Paw]

From my experience, I can tell you, that you need to do two things:
1. Normalize the wave, so it won't be overdriven. If you don't do that, the sound will be pain for ears. I don't remember exact values, just check which db level is the default sound.
2. Tune the pitch down about 30% (do some tries and you'll get the right value). You can also try stretching the wave instead of changing pitch.

[Sutinen]

TIP: You can also borrow some files from other games, like rFactor. Just test the sounds so they will not sound high-pitched.
TIP2: Never release those soundpacks. Like I did not, even though they was awesome. (That would be copying from others.)

[Tonga]

Thanks a lot, guys!
Initially, I had borrowed some sounds from rFactor for testing purposes, but of course I wanted to create something own and different. Paw, I also followed your advice and normalized the wave down to a level that comes close to the default engine sound. Seems to be a bit too weak though, I might again turn it up a bit. As you said, I indeed had to shift the pitch down quite a bit but now it should be ok. Friggin experimental stuff...

I've now changed tactics a bit and decided to use an interior sound of an Honda Civic FN2 Type R. Sounds less "noisy" but yet aggressive enough to give a little racing feeling. Interestingly enough, the recorded sound now is not from a BTCC engine but from a Civic without a turbocharged engine. This should now overall give it a cleaner sound. The looping works quite okay, too, and I hope to be able to release it soon after some final tweaks. The pack will probably contain a new engine and damage sound, not sure about the rest yet.
The sound engine that GR uses can be quite a pain, at least in its current state. During the first test runs, the ingame result was unrecognisably different from the actual input file. Now, the result is quite okay, but still far from what I would have wanted it to sound like... Let's hope there will be a better sound support in future versions - sounds really add to the immersion of the game...