time limit for engine sounds?

[BuckShot]

What's the time limit for the sound files used in ah? Thanks.

~S~ Buck

[Chalenge]

In order to answer your question you almost have to answer the questions you didn't ask. First of all, the engine sounds for planes are the ENG, boats BENG, vehicles VENG. The engine sound itself is probably best to be a minimum of eight seconds, and no more than twenty-four seconds. If it gets too big it can cause problems on systems that are using onboard sound, or USB headsets. Pretty much everyone knows how I feel about that already. If you have listened to any of mine you can hear a pitch shift in some of them. On those sounds you need longer tracks to make it work effectively.

Engine startup should be eight seconds, but I think in practice it varies from plane-to-plane. It is tough in some cases to choose which eight seconds, because engine starts can have some really good sound and usually go longer (on up to three minutes) to really smooth out. So, my practice is to record and mix the engine sound I want and save it to AH. Start AH and run the engine at idle while I record AH playing the sound. Then I mix the engine startup into the idle sound. You can run the startup a little long then so that the transition is as smooth as possible.

Engine shutdown is usually eight seconds, but I notice some of mine are ten seconds. I mix the idle into the shutdown so it's smooth.

If you need to know a precise time, just record a given tone as your sound and then record the playback from AH.

[BuckShot]

Thanks! ~S~

[AKDogg]

Engine sounds can be less the 5secs but are more prone to clicking and having a different tone from listening through adobe auditions, windows media player, vers in game sound.  I had that issue with the corsairs.  Had a file that was 4 secs.  Sound played great outside AH, but in AH is was playing about 25% slower.  5 secs I say is the minimum as the original AH engine files from way back where around 5 secs.  Like Challenge said about the startup files, depends on the plane and range from 6-9 secs.  Shutdown for planes varies to.  GV's on the other had are a lot shorter for shutdown.  They like 4 secs or less for most.  Startup for gv's are like planes.  I recommend at the end of all your startup files, fade the sound.  It will blend better to the engine sound once the eng.wav file takes over after start.

[BuckShot]

Thanks fellas. I wish I had the time to make ah sounds. I'm a musician as a hobby and have a decent ear.

I wanted to know because I was going to add the Spyhunter / Peter Gunn theme as an engine or start up sound for one of the planes, just for kicks.

[Bizman]

Back when the Brewster came along I made all of the sounds for it with the free Audacity program and learned a couple of tricks while doing it: To avoid clicking in a looping engine sound I first tried to locate a nice sample a little longer than the desired length would be. Then I stretched the sound graph so wide I could see each up and down and the pattern they made. It looked like a silhouette of mountains and their upside down mirror images if that helps. Then I simply cut the sample to start where a pattern was crossing the zero line on its way up. Similarly I cut it to end where the pattern line was coming from down under to the zero line. There's even a tool for finding the zero crossing in a marked area. I worked similarly with the starting engine sound, trying to make it end right where the actual engine sound would start for the curve to be continuous. I must say it took a while to get the gap between the two to disappear! Not to mention trying to get the starting "coughs" to match with the smoke puffs of the plane in the game!