Type:
Bug
Severity:
Normal
Game version:
OpenMW
Concerns:
Tamriel_Data
Related Release File:
Found in Version:
Status:
Fixed for Version:
External Link:
Description:
In OpenMW v0.45.0 and TES3MP v0.7.0, some sounds sound way too loud, much louder than in the vanilla engine. It is as if distance isn't taken into account when determining sound volume. This is especially noticable with Ornada "moan" sounds, but other sounds are affected as well:
Morrowind\Data Files\Sound\TR\r\ornada moan.wav
I reported the issue to the OpenMW here: https://gitlab.com/OpenMW/openmw/issues/5235
@cmaugust Converting the Ornada moan .wav file to mono appears to fix the attenuation. Looks like OpenMW doesn't handle stereo sounds properly.
@Capostrophic Content file issue, stereo sounds aren't supposed to be attenuated.
Should all stereo sounds in Tamriel_Data be converted to mono?
Comments
According to the linked
According to the linked OpenMW issue, this bug is also present in the vanilla engine if the "3D Audio" setting is set to "Hardware Accelerated".
Basically, it seems that any audio file that is meant to be played in the 3D world space should be mono, not stereo. So it's okay for music, weather, and UI SFX to be stereo, but pretty much everything else should be mono. This is also mentioned in Tamriel Rebuilt's Audio Guidelines:
I've been doing some testing with ffprobe, which comes with ffmpeg. It looks like 91 of 498 sounds are stereo.
I wrote a script to downmix stereo files to mono, while keeping bit rate and sample rate the same:
https://pastebin.com/puPquJVT
You can find the fixed files here:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/y9it6hbo5m5y8p6/Tamriel_Data-v7.0-Loud-Sound-Fix.7z?dl=0
From some casual in-game testing, I can confirm that this fixed the loudness issues for me.
The following files were affected:
Per discussion on Discord, I
Per discussion on Discord, I submitted the downmixed sound files to the asset browser as a bugfix:
https://www.tamriel-rebuilt.org/asset/downmix-stereo-sounds-mono