SSE How to replace sounds for doors, footsteps, etc?

[ASoSoSniper]

I'm relatively new to this, so forgive my ignorance in some areas.

I'm trying to replace sounds in Skyrim with my own custom sounds, but I've run into some issues I have no idea how to solve.

On the surface, changing sounds looks easy in CK: just find the base object in the Object Window and select which sounds you'd like it to play. But this doesn't seem to work, and I don't know why.

Take the door for example. NorDoorMedium01 clearly has boxes in its editor for 'Open' and 'Close' but filling those boxes with my desired sounds does absolutely nothing, the game just ignores it and continues playing the default sounds. In the case of levers which have an 'Activate' box, your chosen sound just plays on top of the default rather than replacing it.

Then there's the walking and weapon impact sounds. I noticed there were sound descriptors for those, and since there weren't any convenient boxes to put my desired sounds in, I figured I could edit the descriptors directly to get the same result. But the game seems to ignore those changes, too.

I'm really confused as to why sounds are so difficult to change in CK relative to how it seems on the surface. What am I doing wrong? At minimum, how do I change sounds for opening doors and pulling levers? Is interaction with code involved, and if so, how would you access and modify it?

Thanks.

[TyburnKetch]

Doors have sound actually IN their .nif file meshes. I can not remember off the top of my head where, I think on the collision data branch. If you do a quick Google on sounds in .nifs hopefully you can find some more info.

 

Changing the sounds in the .nif might be limiting. But removing the inherent sounds on the mesh will give you the freedom to then add your own sounds in the CK via the base object or script etc.