Added Music Tracks Aren't Loud Enough

[LordShen]

Hey everybody. I’ve been working on a “mod” that adds new music to the game. It’s not a “replacer” or something like that. Now, the general process isn’t difficult for me; just add some .xwm files to the game’s directory, and define their parameters in the CreationKit.

 

But there’s something strange happening with “combat” music, and I can’t figure it out. To make a long story short, certain tracks aren’t loud enough. I’ve tried normalizing, amplifying and compressing them with Audacity. Barely makes a difference, even if you’ve cranked the amplify effect beyond 0 dB and allowed clipping distortions.

 

By the gods, what’s happening?! Here’re some observations of mine:

- The quietest tracks seem to be longer than others.

- I’ve been using .wav formatting, so it’s probably not an issue of post-conversion loss.

- Seems to happen more often on music that’s tagged for dragon fights in the CreationKit.

- The tracks sound fine in Windows. They aren’t abnormally silent compared to tracks that play fine in the game.

 

I’d love to hear if there’s a way to fix this, because I can’t deal with the drastic variations in volume, especially since my favorite tracks tend to get gimped by the issue worse than those I’m less keen on.

[DavideMitra]

In some of my mods, I did add new music to my cells via Sound Descriptor+Sound Marker CK categories.

 

In order to change the music volume, I did touch the "Static Attenuation" slide in the "Sound Descriptor" CK category. The more the slide is on the left, the noisier the music will be.

I just did a lot of in-game testing until I did find the perfect slide position.

 

 

However, I'm not sure if adding music like this could be ok in your case.

My cells/worldspaces didn't feature a music track (I did set "music type: none"). And my specific track would play forever. There wasn't a combat track and an explore track. I guess these kind of things work properly only with the Music Track/Music Type CK categories...aka the categories you are trying to edit.

Edited September 6, 2021 by DavideMitra