I Found Out How to Successfully Edit Full Auto .wav Files

[DitzyDez666]

Everyone has always recommended apps like Audacity for editing the wav files for the gunshot sounds and whatnot in Fallout 4. I go to great lengths to make all the sounds sound as realistic as I can, usually every playthrough I do it differently.  But now I found out that Wavosaur is the only app I've found that can even detect "Loop Points" in the fully automatic wav files.

These loop points are invisible to Audacity and lost when you save a file with even apps like DB Power Amp Producer's Edition in my experience. However, any wav saved through Wavosaur is perfectly playable, because it detects and saves the loop points as well as other things which it can detect that are a little too complicated for me so I don't mess with them.

More cool info for those who actually edit wav files for Fallout 4 all the time:

After going to the "Process" drop-down menu and then hovering over "Volume", it offers to boost/quiet the volume of the track by 6 decibels or you can hit custom to select an integer yourself. Much like Audacity's "Amplify" ability. There are many many other tools that Audacity does not have, however, but not a one that Wavosaur doesn't have as far as I know. But it sure is nice being able to edit wav files now, and attach loop points to sound I take from Star Wars Battlefront II to be used with various modded laser weapons, making incompatible full auto wav files suddenly compatible with Fallout 4. Also Wavosaur can arrange several wav files into a Loop Pointed single wav file. This is cool because a lot of wav files I pull from various video games and websites are broken into pieces for full auto.


 

Edited November 22, 2023 by DitzyDez666

[SonAnima]

I never used Audacity or Wavosaur before so idk how powerful the software is or how they work but its great to know the loop points in a wav file to edit vanilla files. It will make the custom firing sound process much quicker using your method.  The only time I can see this not being useful is if someone sound designs their own custom firing sounds from scratch as they can set their own loop points. If those software lets you use VST's then thats great as that will give you much more control over the sounds. MeldaProduction has a bunch of great free VST's that modders could use to alter sounds to their liking. There are many free VST's out there but many of them are not so great and the crappy ones require you to really know what your doing to get a great result out of them. MeldaProduction is one of the few exceptions. 

[iqoniq]

I guess the loop points lost if they're converted to wxm?

[SonAnima]

On 12/6/2023 at 2:21 AM, iqoniq said:

I guess the loop points lost if they're converted to wxm?

I wouldnt know as I never heard of that sound file type. When sound designing or composing I export my files as wav as that is a great file type for sounds. You can use mp3 but mp3 files are compressed so if you want quality I would avoid that file type unless your making sounds that people can put on their phones. What program are you using?

[iqoniq]

On 12/7/2023 at 7:29 PM, SonAnima said:

I wouldnt know as I never heard of that sound file type. When sound designing or composing I export my files as wav as that is a great file type for sounds. You can use mp3 but mp3 files are compressed so if you want quality I would avoid that file type unless your making sounds that people can put on their phones. What program are you using?

You can't use MP3 files.  Try using MP3 and see what happens.

Most of the dialogue in the game is compressed using the .xwm format, and if you listen closely you can hear the artifacts (little tinkling noises) when characters speak, and it's especially noticeable when you first meet Piper.  If you extract the audio in the game BSAs and try and play the files in something that plays .wav, but doesn't support .xwm, you'll encounter files that seem to be corrupted wavs.  These are just xwm format, renamed to wav.

A mod that's audio heavy can benefit from .xwm because the files are reduced greatly, but they need to have the extensions changed to .wav for the game to see the files.  I've done a few radio and mods with a lot of audio, and I can get 20+ hours of audio to fit in around 500MB.  Yes, there is a trade off (there is a maximum file size that .xwm files can be) in terms of quality, but it's preferable to downloading and wasting 13GB.  Even my conversions of videos for Videos of the Wasteland had to have the sound ran through a converter because I'd have ended up with around a gigabyte more added to the file sizes, and Razorwire even recommends it in his video tutorials (although you didn't need to rename them to wav).

[SonAnima]

19 hours ago, iqoniq said:

You can't use MP3 files.  Try using MP3 and see what happens.

Most of the dialogue in the game is compressed using the .xwm format, and if you listen closely you can hear the artifacts (little tinkling noises) when characters speak, and it's especially noticeable when you first meet Piper.  If you extract the audio in the game BSAs and try and play the files in something that plays .wav, but doesn't support .xwm, you'll encounter files that seem to be corrupted wavs.  These are just xwm format, renamed to wav.

A mod that's audio heavy can benefit from .xwm because the files are reduced greatly, but they need to have the extensions changed to .wav for the game to see the files.  I've done a few radio and mods with a lot of audio, and I can get 20+ hours of audio to fit in around 500MB.  Yes, there is a trade off (there is a maximum file size that .xwm files can be) in terms of quality, but it's preferable to downloading and wasting 13GB.  Even my conversions of videos for Videos of the Wasteland had to have the sound ran through a converter because I'd have ended up with around a gigabyte more added to the file sizes, and Razorwire even recommends it in his video tutorials (although you didn't need to rename them to wav).

Good to know as I never used xwm files before or made any radio mods. Bethesda sure has some weird quirks when it comes to things lol. Sounds like xwm files would work great for music ost mods as well. 

[iqoniq]

1 hour ago, SonAnima said:

Good to know as I never used xwm files before or made any radio mods. Bethesda sure has some weird quirks when it comes to things lol. Sounds like xwm files would work great for music ost mods as well. 

Like I say there's a trade off.  For music files that are around 8 minutes long will break the maximum filesize which is actually a massive limitation.  At that point you start dropping the bitrate and it introduces artifacts.  I've managed to compress tracks in excess of an hour long, but there was a massive quality hit (although it did give the mod the authentic 15th generation copy of a mixtape effect ).  If you want to mess around with it, I'd recommend Lazy Audio ( https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/71749 ).  It's for Skyrim, but Skyrim uses the same formats (same engine almost).

If you want to experiment with long files then Yakatori Audio Converter ( https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/73100 ) has a GUI, which makes altering bitrates easier.  Basically, if you crash it (it will just fail the conversion) then you need to drop the quality.

[DitzyDez666]

On 11/23/2023 at 5:59 PM, SonAnima said:

I never used Audacity or Wavosaur before so idk how powerful the software is or how they work but its great to know the loop points in a wav file to edit vanilla files. It will make the custom firing sound process much quicker using your method.  The only time I can see this not being useful is if someone sound designs their own custom firing sounds from scratch as they can set their own loop points. If those software lets you use VST's then thats great as that will give you much more control over the sounds. MeldaProduction has a bunch of great free VST's that modders could use to alter sounds to their liking. There are many free VST's out there but many of them are not so great and the crappy ones require you to really know what your doing to get a great result out of them. MeldaProduction is one of the few exceptions. 

Yeah the main issue I've had a greeeat many mod authors tell me about is they couldn't get Audacity to even see loop points. And now I'm able to customize all my full auto sounds because all of them seem to require loop points. And especially for giving Star Wars sfx from Battlefront to the AER15 laser rifle mod's full auto sfx. I just compared them in Wavosaur and learned how to make completely unedited broken pieces all link together with looping points (cuz other games do their sounds wildly differently I am learning). But I use Audacity too when I'm just trying to edit a simple single shot wav. Wavosaur and Audacity are both free to use so iz kewl.

[DitzyDez666]

On 12/11/2023 at 3:05 PM, iqoniq said:

Like I say there's a trade off.  For music files that are around 8 minutes long will break the maximum filesize which is actually a massive limitation.  At that point you start dropping the bitrate and it introduces artifacts.  I've managed to compress tracks in excess of an hour long, but there was a massive quality hit (although it did give the mod the authentic 15th generation copy of a mixtape effect ).  If you want to mess around with it, I'd recommend Lazy Audio ( https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/71749 ).  It's for Skyrim, but Skyrim uses the same formats (same engine almost).

If you want to experiment with long files then Yakatori Audio Converter ( https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/73100 ) has a GUI, which makes altering bitrates easier.  Basically, if you crash it (it will just fail the conversion) then you need to drop the quality.

Oooo that will be useful. Lazy Audio sounds kewl. 

[DiodeLadder]

I'd recommend using Steinberg's Wavelab Elements.  Wavelab has been around since when we still used hardware samplers (musical instruments), and it's great for this kind of editing.  Full version of Wavelab is pricey, as that one has full coding capability for professional mastering plants, but the Elements version is much cheaper, and you can pick it up for like 50 bucks during sales.

Here is what a Bethesda auto firing SFX file looks like in Wavelab :

The green markers are the loop start/end, and for each individual shots, there are unnamed markers (yellow ones) which I think are used to sync audio with WeaponFire annotations in hkx animation files.  The last shot marker and the loop end marker are placed for the same shot, but 4 ms apart (as you can see in the top left section).  48kHz 16 bit mono WAV, root = C3. 

Metadata says it was originally created using Sony Sound Forge 9.0, by the way (it's now owned by Magix, not Sony).  I think Sound Forge shows up in Humble Bundles sales from time to time, although I don't remember which version.

I hope this helps.

Edited January 10 by DiodeLadder