Unlistenable Sound and Forum Behavior

[Losco Nosciuto 9]

So, you've got told by a lot of users that the sounds of this plane...just suck.

 

It's an awesome plane, with an issue. Issue happens, issue are normal and Aerosoft isn't ran by gods so they can make mistakes too.

 

 

But hell, this answer!!

 

 

 

So, paying customers are put aside and not listened, and instead YouTubers who mainly don't even pay for their TWotter since it's given out free for reviewing purposes (I worked 4 years in a videogames webzine, I know what I am talking about ) are considered are the main comparison term for a product?

 

This is not the way I expect a company to be, this denial of facts brought up by a lot of people is not troubleshooting or helping, and not admitting that "it could have been done better" doesn't make an imperfect product perfect. So yeah, TWotter sounds, just sucks. Get over it, and start not treating customers as useless crap and YouTubers like the only term for comparing reality of things in your products. Thank you.

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[Eric Bakker 736]

4 hours ago, Losco Nosciuto said:

So, you've got told by a lot of users that the sounds of this plane...just suck.

It's an awesome plane, with an issue. Issue happens, issue are normal and Aerosoft isn't ran by gods so they can make mistakes too.

But hell, this answer!!

So, paying customers are put aside and not listened, and instead YouTubers who mainly don't even pay for their TWotter since it's given out free for reviewing purposes (I worked 4 years in a videogames webzine, I know what I am talking about ) are considered are the main comparison term for a product?

This is not the way I expect a company to be, this denial of facts brought up by a lot of people is not troubleshooting or helping, and not admitting that "it could have been done better" doesn't make an imperfect product perfect. So yeah, TWotter sounds, just sucks. Get over it, and start not treating customers as useless crap and YouTubers like the only term for comparing reality of things in your products. Thank you.

 

 

Hi Losco,

We value your opinion. Later yesterday Mathijs has posted the following comment below. As I see it, it shows AS does care about it's customers:

I am confident there will be improvements made.

[Eric Bakker 736]

In fact, I know that already progress has been made on the sound.

[Losco Nosciuto 9]

Glad to hear what's going on behind the curtains.
The issue I had wasn't much for the plane issue, but for the way the customer's opinion has been handled by some people. I'm glad who's in charge got it finally, but that was some hell of an answer, and it's a kind of answers I'm seeing more and more over many games, sims and third parties. Fact is, this is not freeware, and any word is advertisement
This said, I'm glad the thing got all sorted.


One side notice. The issue is not "the sound itself", at least not to my ears since it is pleasently similar, just some slight difference but, who cares? 

What's wrong is the lack of dynamics, but well it has been discussed a lot so, it's just nice to know it's being worked on

[Payt Laros 28]

Dynamics is kind of a hard thing to do in a desktop simulation, If you'd have to reflect the true dynamic range of a real Twotter, it'd go from hearing close to nothing at idle, to exceedingly loud at full RPM. If you want audio at all levels, you always have to make a compromise. So you bring the levels of the low rpm sounds a bit closer to the high rpm sounds, until you come to an acceptable range that still sounds like the thing you're trying to emulate.

 

Just think of it. You could comfortably take a switch from a twotter into your living room and switch it, and that would be fine as far as sound level. If you took one of the PT-6's into your living room and ran that at full RPM, I don't think you or your neighbours would enjoy that. So you have to lower the volume of the engine. But then you wouldn't hear the switches or the low rpm sounds anymore if you still maintained the same dynamic range while being able to comfortably run the engines at full throttle

 

Anyway I thik you get it by now

[ReproCase 17]

4 hours ago, Payt Laros said:

Dynamics is kind of a hard thing to do in a desktop simulation, If you'd have to reflect the true dynamic range of a real Twotter, it'd go from hearing close to nothing at idle, to exceedingly loud at full RPM. If you want audio at all levels, you always have to make a compromise. So you bring the levels of the low rpm sounds a bit closer to the high rpm sounds, until you come to an acceptable range that still sounds like the thing you're trying to emulate.

 

Just think of it. You could comfortably take a switch from a twotter into your living room and switch it, and that would be fine as far as sound level. If you took one of the PT-6's into your living room and ran that at full RPM, I don't think you or your neighbours would enjoy that. So you have to lower the volume of the engine. But then you wouldn't hear the switches or the low rpm sounds anymore if you still maintained the same dynamic range while being able to comfortably run the engines at full throttle

 

Anyway I thik you get it by now

Everything you say is true. However, what happened on v1.0 of this aircraft for MSFS is that somehow this has released with less dynamic range than *anything else* in the sim. The dynamic range of a twin otter in real life, comparing a single switch to the entire engine is *greater* than most all other aircraft out there. Not less. The end result of the sound design has resulted in a complete and total lack of dynamic range -- not a reasonable compromise, an utter obliteration of the idea of dynamics.
 

If I have to immediately turn my speakers down when I start the engines and they are at idle, and then on takeoff the sounds change but don't really get louder, we have defeated the joy of simulating sound with dynamics.

 

I believe the team understands what has happened here and is no doubt making great progress on a fix. I look forward to it.

 

We don't mind that the aircraft is loud. We enjoy the wonderful sounds. But it is wrong to say that it sounds like the real thing and we just don't like it; it doesn't.

[Losco Nosciuto 9]

Dynamics isn't all by positional audio. Dynamics is inclusive with insulation simulation, with distance factor, sound filtering, frequency gammas and sound compression. As an amateur music producer myself, and as a singer I do realize that dynamics in a ..well, dynamic environment such a simulation or everything where your sound has not to be static, is difficult. But what's wrong is that in every plane you get the feeling of wearing ear protections, or you feel the difference with a closed door, are wether you're or not running one or two engines.

 

So yeah it's hard as we all know, but that was took in account by (almost) any other plane maker out there, wasn't it?

[BudSpencer 116]

Folks, no one ever spoke out the exact problem of the Twin Otter sound. That's why I'm writing here in the hope that someone reads it who is really working on a fix:

 

The 2 most important things that makes an engine sound appear "smooth" is:

 

1) a proper cross-fading of the volumes from one sound recording (yes the *.wav files) to another.

2) a proper change in frequencies that match the next sound file.

 

...given that there are proper sound recordings in those files are correct.

 

From what I can hear in the youtube videos, there's nothing wrong with the recordings themselves, and there's nothing to little wrong with the fading of the volumes. But there's a lot (!) wrong with the frequencies of the files, because they don't change at all or only very little while increasing or decreasing power. I've seen the exact issue years ago at Carenado's C 206 (the old one) and with their Seneca II. Various people claimed to have made it smoother by editing the sound.cfg then, but did exactly nothing to the core of the problem: the spooling up of the frequencies of the files. So, at that time, I fixed it myself by adjusting the "rparms=..." entries in the sound.cfg with success. OK, it took quite some time, because if you have no app that visualises this for you - and I don't know any - it's pretty much trial and error, until you come close to what it's right. But it works.

 

So, in short, here's a generic example from P3d (same thing since FS2004 or even 2002, I believe):

 

[Spool-Sound1]

filename=Spool1  => name of the sound file, minus the .wav extention in its name

(...)

rparams=0.6000,1.000000,0.87000,1.3000  => ...which means: At 60 % power (1st value), the sound engine of FS plays the file with 100% (second value) of its speed, thus as it is recoded. At 87 % power (3rd value), it plays the file with 1.3x (4th value) of its speed, thus pitching up all frequencies of in the file by factor 1.3

 

It's the same principle like playing a sound file in time lapse, making the music sound in higher or lower scales, or transposing them, as musicians would say. Just with the difference that the sound engine of FSX and Prepar3d is able to smoothen that transposition depending on engine power (I'm sure every aircraft developer can tell more exactly which parameter of the engine power exactly). In Any case, those "rparams=..." define two points within a linear line (I don't know the exact mathematic term in English), that connect engine power to the way the *.wav file is played. And that is what has to be fixed here.

 

I've seen in various aircraft in MSFS that the sound information are packed (pck-file??) so that I can't directly see the sound.cfg or whatever it is called now. But even if the structure of the files might differ from P3d and earlier sims, the musical problem remains the same.

 

You might say now, that you know every single bit of what I've written here, but I'm not completely sure if the proper things are discussed here in this thread, regarding the sound issue. I'm not saying that as a programmer (actually I have no clue about this), but as a musician with an acued sense of hearing: This has not to do with recording quality, nor with sound dynamics (OK, that might be a seperate little problem), but with proper pitching of the files. Thanks for concidering that in the fix.