What Walking Sounds Like

[Soandso]

http://rapidshare.com/files/2852366029/Track%201_1.wav

It generates random noise over the footsteps.
My card is Audigy 4.

[AntJam]

Been getting the same thing as well I have a realtek sound card. I deleted the terrain.ufo (defines terrain sounds for footsteps) and most soldiers and aliens lose there walk sounds but some like the hoverbot and blood spiders dont. Anyway this stopped the white noise issues at the cost of walksounds something I can put up with.

[Crystan]

Have the issue as well. Its definitively not a soundcard/driver issue. I presume something broke with the port to SDL2. I also presume its a windows only problem? (running on win7 here)

[AntJam]

Running on Windows vista 64 game build from 21.9.13. Spent a couple of hours playing without the terrain.ufo and had no issues (other than the lack of footsteps) so at least have a workaround (the white noise was beginning to put my teeth on edge after a while) till the problem is tracked down. And definitely not corrupt sounds I checked them.

[Crystan]

Any news about this bug? Have it been fixed? I cant test it atm.

[DarkRain]

Hasn't been fixed, also see bug #5158

[Crystan]

Alright, thanks!

[DarkRain]

User reports the problem to be caused by bad sample rate (of 8012 Hz) of some sound files, see comments in the tracker.

[Crystan]

None of my sounds (of which many are used for footsteps) have a minimum of 44khz. I know some of grens sounds have this sample rate, but many of them aren't used anymore.

Also i've found this report:
http://ufoai.org/bugs/ufoalieninvasion/issues/5193

We could try to convert all sounds to wav and see if it still happens.

[Destructavator]

Perhaps I can be of some assistance, given that I'm an audio DSP software coder.

Although I've been away from this project for a long time, as you may have heard I'm coming back and working on getting caught up.

Writing C/C++ code for resampling audio on-the-fly (in realtime) is indeed one of my skills.  What I'm not too familiar with, though, is SDL2 and exactly how it handles sound.

I was working on upgrading my ancient Linux distro to a current version with all packages, but given that this issue was reported on Windows, I suppose I could get a copy of the source and set it up on one of my Windows machines, most likely by sometime later today.

I could use some help in being directed to what parts of UFO AI (which source code files) are used to interact with SDL2, and then I might be willing to help troubleshoot the issue.  (And if it is with SDL2 and not UFO AI, I could then send a patch to the SDL devs.)

BTW, my Windows machines have Windows 7 x64, Windows 7 x32, and one has Windows 8.1.  I also have some special "pro-sumer" (professional audio engineering-grade, intended for high-end recording studio) level soundcards as well as basic built-in ones in the Windows machines, so I could definitely find out if it is a soundcard issue or not.

[misiekt]

I'm playing 2.5-dev IA-32 Oct 12 2013, and it was bugging me too, so I did some digging. Cause of loud "white noise" has nothing to do with soundcard or drivers.  It's wrong/unsupported/bugged frequency of some OGG files in sound/footsteps directory. Some of them have sampling at 44100Hz and are playing fine. But there are some sampled at around 8kHz, and they are wrong. Probably most noticable metal(1-4).ogg, since its played every time aliens are walking inside ship, so pretty often. Of course its possible that game engine suppose to play them correctly too, but it doesn't. BTW they causing MPlayer to loop forever too.

Anyway, all I had to do was to resample those 8kHz OGG-s to working frequency 44.1kHZ. Now I can hear aliens walking on metal surface instead of static sound. Im attaching resampled files, its enough to unpack them into your mods directory and run "ufo +set fs_game fixsnd". Or, if your'e already use another mod just copy directory "sound" into it. In any case they should overlap bad files from 0snd.pk3

cheers

[Grug]

I was working on upgrading my ancient Linux distro to a current version with all packages, but given that this issue was reported on Windows, I suppose I could get a copy of the source and set it up on one of my Windows machines, most likely by sometime later today.

This is also occurring on Linux as noted in the bug report and also I can confirm it on current Debian Testing (Jessie).

Given the cross-platform nature, I would suggest it isn't a sound card issue. It's far more likely to either be a bug in the params we are setting in SDL2 when loading/playing the sounds, or a bug in SDL2 itself.

I had a similar problem when developing the audio system for Eternal Lands under SDL1. IIRC the SDL load file function wasn't detecting the frequency correctly and needed to be manually specified. Of course if the incorrect freq was specified then it would also break. I believe we converted all sounds to the same format and manually specified the freq. (Note: That was 8 years ago so I can't be completely sure of the circumstances.)

[Grug]

This is also occurring on Linux as noted in the bug report and also I can confirm it on current Debian Testing (Jessie).

The fixed sounds below fix the walking issues for me (so far). I have noticed one of the screams, probably a woman one is also broken.