Has anyone got any advice for recording sound effects for use in a game? I'm specifically wondering about required microphone(s), recording medium etc. to get something that most people would consider acceptable (or good) sound quality.

Much of the information on the web dealing with recording of sound effects, or foley work, is aimed at the professional or prosumer with portable DAT recorder and associated hardware. I realize that recording straight into a PC has drawbacks due to soundcard quality etc. but can I get by with a low-end (under $100) microphone and direct to PC connection? Other than probably wanting a directional microphone to avoid background noise, is there anything special that should be considered?

Once the sound is in the PC it seems that the most popular sound manipulation software (for Windows) is Sound Forge or WaveLab. Less expensive software includes Cool Edit, Goldwave and SoundProbe. Any opinions on the programs mentioned, or alternate software suggestions?

-Pat

Funny, I was just wondering this myself today. I don't have any advice on recording (I'm curious to find out what can be done inexpensively too), but I've been pretty happy with Cool Edit. It's certainly been more than adequate for all my game sound needs.

Wow, timely post. Today I finished coding my Audio subsystem and started workiing on the sound effects. I've used Cool Edit in the past (i.e., in the .VOC days) and was very pleased with it. Currently I'm working with Sound Forge Studio and wondering if it's worth upgrading from studio to the two-bedroom version. I'm having trouble getting it to produce consistent Ogg Vorbis results. I don't think I'm going to do much recording with my cheap mike; I'll probably use a lot of prefab sfx and post-process them for a unique sound. I have two sfx collections, and there are a number sites out there that sell by the sample. Here are a few I'll be looking into:

Sound Dogs (http://www.sounddogs.com)
Sound Rangers (http://www.soundrangers.com)
Prime Sounds (http://www.primesounds.com) (more geared to music)
Sound Effects (http://www.soundeffects.com)
Sound of the Web (http://www.soundoftheweb.com)

I have a day job in tech support. I spend all day talking into a cheap little headset. I can tell you from first hand experience that you can get a very good sound quality out of a cheap microphone. When people by the expensive stuff, they are paying for good sound no matter how poor the environment is. If you've got a cheap mic, you just have to pamper it. Here are the most commen problems I've had.

Background buzz: Move the mic away from any objects that use electricity. The magnetic field is generating electricity in the mic which it mistakes for sound.

Loud Irregular Static: There's a loose connection or part. Immobilize the mic.

Wind: This is most common with voice recording. The mic doesn't have air flow protection. Hold it beside your mouth or any moving objects. As long as it's pointing towards the source of the sound it doesn't need to be directly in the air stream.

Loud sounds are terrible: Your mic can only handle sounds that are so loud. Move the mic farther away and increase the volume later in your sound editor.

Some other things to keep in mind about the sound file. 8-bit sound files always have a background hiss, so try recording in 16-bit before you blame your mic. Stereo doubles the size of the sound. Stick to one channel sound if you can. Also, some sound editors can smooth out the sound when lowering the sample rate. You can record at CD quality and cut the quality (and file size) in half with only a slight drop in quality if the software is good enough.

That's all I can think of. Hope this helps.

For my sound effects I just hook up my mic (I bought it used) to my Sound Blaster Live and record in Cakewalk. I've got an FX add-on that was effective for noise reduction, but I've found that the default setting for the noise reduction feature in Goldwave miraculously gets rid of any hiss problems without much tweaking. It doesn't matter that I have some inferior tools. So yes, it's likely that you can get away with what you have, as long as you figure out how to use the software to your advantage.

I've been buying all my effects from SoundDogs for a while. It's relatively cheap, the quality is generally very good, and their library is full of just about anything you can think of. For instance, in A Snake's Life I needed the sound of an angry Porcupine. They had that. I'm not exactly sure how I'd go about recording that myself, but it sounds painful :-)

I'm still not up to working on a product for release, but I found this CD useful for playing around. Its called 6000 Sound Effects and it's from Cosmi. The web site says that the sound effects are royalty free for use in computer programs, etc.

I found it last year at either BestBuy.com or CircuitCity.com for under $15 -- which I felt couldn't be beat for giving me a bunch of sounds to play with as I work up to developing things.

I've looked at the cost of some of the sound effects libraries out there and they are definately priced to be a small fraction of the budget of a feature film (but they'd be a large fraction of my current income).

When I was first looking for sound effects I was pretty sure there ought to be cheapo libraries on disk (the same way there are cheapo clipart and font libraries). It took me a while to locate this -- and a while to find an online store that sold it. Now CompUSA carries it (I recently saw it in the store and they also have it online).

Those of you already working on this in a serious professional way may want something more expensive, but for starting out on a budget it's hard to beat $9.99.

Manufacturer link & description
http://www.cosmi.com/html/product%20pages/productivity/6000soundeffects.htm

CompUSA sales page
http://www.compusa.com/products/product_info.asp?product_code=272387

- Eric Shefferman

I also bought a sound effects library, more specifically the series 8000 Sci-Fi from Sound Ideas. The list price they advertise is 395$. I am not a sound-pro and I think it saved me tenfold in lost time. And it would take me years to learn how to get the quality they boost.

Timely indeed :) I just got done writing a tutorial for recording sounds on the cheap with a explanation of using the noise reduction in CoolEdit2k.

http://www.silvercrk.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=164

If you want to do your own recording in the field ( I've stood in a few to get some samples <Grin>) one hack is to use a Digital Camcorder... if you don't have one, probably someone you know does. It's not DAT but it's pretty darn clean since it stores it digitally to tape at CD quality.

Let me know if the tutorial makes ANY sense :)

Originally posted by Jonas
http://www.silvercrk.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=164

Let me know if the tutorial makes ANY sense :)
The tutorial makes perfect sense (after filling in a missing word here and there ;) )

The info about saving a few seconds of ambient sound, and how the noise reduction works, will certainly help. I hadn't thought of using a DV camcorder, that's an interesting idea. It's also a nice way to get a visual log of exactly how a sound was created. Some other alternatives I've seen referenced include a using a portable mini-disc recorder, or some of the newer MP3 players that include MP3 encoding from an input source.

-Pat

Yep, the visual log does come in pretty handy.

There really is something to say for going out and getting some of your sound yourself.

Kinda gives you a feeling of acompishment and is also a great excuse to go ourdoors and slosh around a creek or something :)

Make sure you use headphones so you can hear what the recorder ( whatever it might be) is picking up.

Let me second using a DV cam to record sounds. Works great. I got a lot of good stuff off of sounddogs.com too.

Jack

Do they deliberately knobble the samples at Sound Dogs? Some of the sounds of guns I've listened to are pretty bad.

Originally posted by ferret
I'm still not up to working on a product for release, but I found this CD useful for playing around. Its called 6000 Sound Effects and it's from Cosmi. ... Those of you already working on this in a serious professional way may want something more expensive, but for starting out on a budget it's hard to beat $9.99. I saw it in CompUSA today so I picked it up. This would be otherwise a great deal if these recordings were better. Most seem to be 8-bit and 8-11 khz and very hissy. :o Heh, I guess that's to be expected from a five-year old sound fx collection.

@Davaris: It says they're ""lo-fi demos," but I actually thought they sounded good. Or that might just might be in comparison to the lo-lo-fi sfx in the Cosmi collection. :) You should hear the mangling to do at www.soundeffects.com. Edit: Sorry, you were talking about Sound Dogs and I was referring to www.soundrangers.com. www.sounddogs.com says in the FAQ that the previews are "low resolution." Which I guess means the same as "lo-fi demos."

Here are the tools that I usually use:

1. VCR
2. Soundblaster
3. Goldwave
4. Old kung fu movies :)

I also like to synth some of my sounds... Google a little free program called SimSynth, it's pretty handy. Orangator/Visual Orangator are not too shabby either.

Some sound effect CDs are just for playing around with and aren't ment to be use in productions. Make sure that it says that it's Royalty Free samples that you are allowed to use.

Places like Sounddogs are selling you samples for that use.

So be careful.

I hope those KungFu movies are public domain :)

Well, if the Shaw Brothers or Golden Harvest comes after me for sampling a 1/2 second "hai!" from a late 70's kung fu movie, then they're really paying too much attention. ;)

It's suprising how many sound effects I have heard in games that were sampled from old movies... I wonder if they all got permission? Golden Axe (sound from Conan) and Tobal 2 (the Roc bird screech from Clash of the Titans), off the top of my head, did this.

I remember the first time I went to Sound Dogs and they expected you to buy without listening to anything. Now they have demos that are so bad you can't tell if you like them or not. That's bad business.

Originally posted by elund
...I'm having trouble getting it to produce consistent Ogg Vorbis results...
Hey, I'm interested in using Ogg Vorbis for streaming audio in my game, but before I start slogging through the docs I have a question:

Is there any decent sample code that just gives the basics of playing an Ogg Vorbis file to the sound card in Windows (either using Windows Multimedia or DirectSound)??? Preferably in C++ or C, but I'm not too picky about language. I'd just like to have something that I can take apart and compile again so that I know it's actually working.

Thanks!

Game programming gems three has a chapter on using ogg vorbis (including sample code) as well as many other useful chapters, I highly reccomend it.

If you want something to do all that stuff for you and better than you ever could do a search for FMod. It's dirt cheap for shareware.

The two tools I use for sound recording/editing are both freeware: Encounter2000 (http://www.waschbusch.com/software.asp) and Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/)

The latter is just generally a better sound editing tool but can't resample sounds (ie. convert a 16bit sound down to 8bit, for example) so I use the former to optimize sound clips after creating them using Audacity.

Just wanted to provide an update -

It turns out that Ogg Vorbis is very easy to use. The sample code provided in the distribution was adequate for my purposes. I got the vorbisfile library plugged into my existing sound architecture in about a day.

One minor note - my game is compiled using multi-threaded static-linked C run-time libraries. The debug versions of the vorbis lib's come set up for multi-threaded DLL CRT. Fortunately, the vorbis source distribution includes MSVC project files for all the libraries, so it only took a few minutes to rebuild them to suit my needs.

Thanks to all who provided suggestions and references, even though I ended up not really needing them!

Now I just need to get busy composing some decent background music. :)

Sound Ideas also has two sample CD's (IIRC for $30 each) SFX Vol.1 and SFX Vol.2, which are excellent.