[WANTED] Soldiers and civilians death sounds needed.

[Zenerka]

The code is done - all our actors (aliens, civilians, humans) can produce sounds after being killed. While thanks to your contributions we have pack of the alien death sounds to check and enable usage, we definitely do not have any humans death sounds.
If you are going to contribute, check
team_humans.ufo and team_civilians.ufo actor definitions. Currently you see there a lot of definitions with single soundfile called misc/newmission.wav. I put them there just because we don't have real death sounds for such actors.
Three things:
1) as you see in these scriptfiles, we can use different sounds for males and females
2) every actor type (german female or american male, etc) can have more than one sound definition - in this case these will be randomly picked
3) If you are going to contribute, please do not give us pack with many files to check - just post there a link to the sound with comment like "death sound for german female definition" or something like that.

Thanks in advance for your contributions!

PS You most probably noticed "hurtsound" definitions in scriptfiles; don't bother - the code about hurtsounds is not finished yet.

[qubodup]

Hey, I made some recordings quite a while ago. *Very* bad recording quality.

http://ufoai.ninex.info/forum/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=1527.0;attach=95 - Four files, male death. I am mostly German, though born in Russia.

License: WTFPL

Please tell me what exactly you find bad about the tracks, as I am interested in recording and sound design and thus want to improve and like to know peoples' points of view.

Check the attachment (in case you didn't see..)

[attachment deleted by admin]

[Destructavator]

Question - Does it always matter what nation a person is from when it comes to grunts, cries, and screams (without words)?  It might be easier to just have two categories, male and female.  Otherwise, the chances of finding enough people who have the recording equipment, two from every nation (one for male and one for female, of a specific country of origin) would be rather difficult.  If a death cry doesn't have words, I'd think it would be pretty universal.

[Destructavator]

Hey, I made some recordings quite a while ago. *Very* bad recording quality.

http://ufoai.ninex.info/forum/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=1527.0;attach=95 - Four files, male death. I am mostly German, though born in Russia.

License: WTFPL Smiley

Please tell me what exactly you find bad about the tracks, as I am interested in recording and sound design and thus want to improve and like to know peoples' points of view.

Check the attachment (in case you didn't see..)

I've done recording and sound editing for a long time - If you can tell me how you recorded these I could help you record better samples (not to imply that these are too terrible or anything).

- What kind of microphone do you use?  Dynamic and Condenser XLR mics are fairly common for general recording, although for human voice I'd recommend a Condenser for good quality, although almost all Condensers require phantom power supply.

- What software do you use to record with?

- What plugins and FX do you use?

It also sounds like (no offense) you may have had the mic too close when you recorded some of these, resulting in clipping - A common method of recording good vocal samples is to have some air between the mic and the mouth, and use a software or hardware compressor FX (Most people prefer to start with a 1:4 ratio on the compressor as a starting point, then adjust different parameters as needed.)  A lot of people commonly make the mistake of being too close to the mic, it's one of the most frequent mistakes.  (The only time a musician, for example, will "swallow" the mic is during a live performance, which is under very different conditions - when they record in the studio they usually do everything differently.)

BTW, if I've lost you or threw any terms at you you don't understand, let me know and I can elaborate, as well as give you links to free software that could help.

Also, the last one, 2007_04_05-07.wav actually doesn't sound too bad, I personally think it is usable.

[qubodup]

Thanks for your offer, Destructavator! I was hoping to see you on the irc today. Anyways:
For recording the sounds of my post above, I used one of them cheap-as-air mics. You can see it stripped here. I used the default windows sound recording tool back then and I think I tried to create an effect as if I was speaking through a bad connection (I wanted to eliminate/make use of the terrible recording quality when using the software booster which makes mic recording more loud.)

http://nothingdoesntsuck.googlepages.com/uargh.tar.bz2

The recordings (9x male death, "uaarrgh") are made using an hp ipaq hx4100 with the software "Audio Recorder". I removed noise and cut in to pieces using Audacity.

Is the noise removal noticeable? I think these recordings are much better.

License again WTFPL, text included in archive. If you want to use these files, I'd be glad if you kept the license (even if it entitles you to change it to any other) because I think that using=spreading this license would make some people use it who otherwise would not use a license at all.

Tell me if I can make life easier for you with the sound files or future submissions (upload to wiki, svn using some standard archive format.. you name it)

I want to get a mobile sound recorder - I'd use it for voice recording too I'm sure. I was recommended the zoom h2 (200EUR) on pdsounds.org but first I'll find out if I can get away cheaper by building something myself.

Tell me what you think of the recordings.

[attachment deleted by admin]

[Destructavator]

Tell me what you think of the recordings.

IMO these do sound a bit better in quality (with the way they were rendered), but regarding the original content being recorded, they don't sound very loud - It makes me envision someone pointing a gun at a person and saying "die quietly!" - as opposed to a loud, blood-chilling scream in terror.  No offense intended with the feedback, but it seems you didn't want to disturb someone in the next room.

I actually have the same problem - I live in a high-rise apartment building where I can't make too much noise, and very little of my recording equipment is portable.

I want to get a mobile sound recorder - I'd use it for voice recording too I'm sure. I was recommended the zoom h2 (200EUR) on pdsounds.org but first I'll find out if I can get away cheaper by building something myself.

Something like that would be great for solving the problem I just mentioned - you could go someplace where you could get away with making lots of noise and record some great death screams.  I looked up this product on the American amazon.com site, almost everyone who bought it gave it five stars out of five, it would probably be a great step up from your present mic.  (I certainly wouldn't go any higher in price - In my experience with sound/music/audio gear its usually a good idea to upgrade in small steps, as opposed to starting with little and suddenly getting a high-end portable multitrack recorder/mixer of some type, for example.)

EDIT:  BTW, Audacity is a rather decent program to use for audio work, and in my experience is better than some of the commercial/non-free software apps that I've seen.

[qubodup]

No offense intended with the feedback, but it seems you didn't want to disturb someone in the next room.

Heh, exactly right. But the reason was that it was about 3 AM when I did the recordings, a little screaming at day time would be ok I guess. (Then again, the recording quality isn't that much better as I thought it was when posting)

[MCR]

Hey !

I noticed that in base/sound/soldiers there are 4 female & 5 male deathsounds & only 1 hurtsound per gender ?!
I noticed that in base/sound/civilians there are even less sounds available ?!

My questions:

Are you still needing additional sounds ?
If not, don't you also think that a little bit more variation would be nice ?
If you do, I could sample some more of them & upload them here ?!
Should be fun to record the screaming & yelling of some of my friends 
Is hurtsound implemented yet ?

Thanx for answering ! I really would like to contribute to this great project & this is a task possible to do for me !

[Mattn]

of course we still need more sounds - just nobody did contribute more at the moment. feel free to contribute some - but keep the licensing stuff in mind.

[MCR]

I will start to work on it.
Expect some first results & uploads next week !
I think WTFPL Licence ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTFPL#Text_of_the_license ) will be okay for me.

[MCR]

Did some experiments with sampling stuff, but unfortunately my microphone is very bad & the recording-quality is not quite as good as I would like to have it & as this game deserves 
I am trying to organize a good microphone & will start again from scratch, maybe we also could use some gpl or cc samples also, but I did not find good resources on the net yet...

[Mattn]

have a look here - there is a list with some links: http://ufoai.ninex.info/wiki/index.php/Music_and_sounds

[MCR]

Hey !

I scanned through the net & checked out many of the free sound samples databases. Like always most of the databases contain only crap or the licensing stuff & origin is unclear  , but

http://www.freesound.org

is loaded with many different high-quality samples, all licensed under Creative Commons Sampling Plus 1.0 License:

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/sampling+/1.0/

Question to the developers: Is this license ok 4 you ?

Then I could cut the samples, maybe encode them in *.ogg, rename them & upload them somewhere.

Here an example:

http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=89278

I think this & many other sounds I found there, could be useful for this project 

[geever]

It's not DFSG compatible, only Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (CC-BY-SA) v3.0 is it (of CCs).

-geever

[MCR]

@geever:
The wiki says different !? 

http://ufoai.ninex.info/wiki/index.php/Music_and_sounds

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