Sound pack for game development available

[speaker]

Hi,

I have made a sound package for game, mod and map developers. The present version contains about 740 sounds in 31 categories (separate folders, see the README below). The size of the archive is 129 MB, it can be downloaded here:

http://download.tuxfamily.org/q3min/tmp/freesound.zip

This is the README of the package:

============================================

FREESOUND.ZIP

The sounds in this archive have been downloaded from the WEB site
'freesound.org'. They are distributed under the Creative Commons
Sampling Plus 1.0 license. The license can be found here:

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/sampling+/1.0/

Excerpt from the license:

'Your Derivative Work(s) must only make a partial use of the original
Work, or if You choose to use the original Work as a whole, You must
either use the Work as an insubstantial portion of Your Derivative Work(s)
or transform it into something substantially different from the original
Work.'

My interpretation is that if you only include a couple of sounds in
unchanged form into a several MB game level or into a large game pack,
then you are in the clear. I also believe that according to the terms of
the license modified sounds (derivative works) may be distributed under
the GNU General Public License. Disclaimer: IANAL, so ask one if this is
important to you.

Sounds on 'freesound.org' are in many different formats (WAV, AIF,
MP3, OGG, FLAC, etc.). In addition, their sample size and number
of channels are also variable (8, 16 or 24 bits, mono or stereo).
Quake III Arena and its derivatives use 16-bit mono sounds sampled at
22 kHz. In order to make the sounds in this archive easier to use, I
have converted them to this format. I have also removed silent and/or
uninteresting parts from the original sound samples, and made them
seamlessly looping when it was possible. Not all sounds have been
modified by me (maybe 90 percent, I am not sure), so you should
look up the original and make a comparison if you are worried abut
license issues.

Sounds in the archive are divided into several categories, each having
a separate folder. The following categories are used at present:

alarm
ambience
animal
bell_gong
bubbling
choir
click
creaking
drip
electric
fire
footstep
grunt_fight
hissing_noise
hum
human
machine
mechanical
metallic
monster
musical
rain
ringing
scream
shot_explosion
splash
swoosh
thunder
water
weird_scifi
wind

This categorization is probably not perfect, but certainly better than
having all files in a single folder.

I have kept the original sound names (except for occasional '_1', '_2',
etc. postfixes when several sounds were derived from a single downloaded
sample). The names are quite haphazard but the arrangement of the
different parts is consistent:

1. each name starts wiht a unique ID number
2. the next token is the name/ID of the author
3. the rest is a brief description

When you want to give credit (as you are obliged to do), you should quote
the ID number and the following token (author name) and mention 'freesound.org'.

=============================================

In case if you are curious why I created this archive: I am one of the developers of the freely distributable minimalistic clone of Q3A called Q3MIN (http://www.q3min.org). We needed this material for the creation of replacements for the sounds used in the original game. I thought that other people working on maps or mods may also find this stuff useful, so just zipped the folder where I kept these sounds and added this README.

Enjoy!

Speaker

[sock]

Excellent idea speaker!

The http://www.freesound.org/ site is amazing and I would highly recommend anyone to go and take visit, register and contribute to the online library. Alot of the sounds are raw, unprocessed and will need converting to the correct format for Q3 but that can be fixed with some good free software.

I personally recommend you try http://www.audacityteam.org/ because it can read a lot of different sound formats (the free sound org place has a crazy amount of different file formats) and the mixing part is easy to use, plus its FREE to use.

I really hope the freesound site becomes the standard place to go because up to now, getting hold of sfx on the internet has been a nightmare of pay sites which charge a crazy amount of money for mod/free projects.

[AEon]

That's one of the reasons why I have always shied away from adding new sounds, sure it is cool, and from my huge list of music mp3s (yes, I own all those CDs), I'd have loved adding my fav music to the maps, but due to copyright issues this is not possible. Probably why I always felt using new sounds had the same issues... and did as Sock points out.

Presently downloading the sounds to see if they inspire something neat.

@speaker
Thanks for the work.

Should we mappers keep those long file names, or are we free to rename them? Obviously one would credit them... would we be crediting your archive primarily, mentioning freesound.org as original site?

[speaker]

@sock:

Thanks for the tip about Audacity. I have tried it maybe twice but both times I was deterred by its somewhat non-standard and unintuitive interface. I found that some operations that are standardized and dead easy in a number of other sound editors are not available or are implemented in a strange way in Audacity. I use GoldWave, it is also very capable.

I agree that the content of 'freesound' is amazing, but the site could be a bit better organized. Searching capabilities are rudimentary: for example AFAIK it is not possible to search within the results of a previous search to narrow down the hits. You have to wade through a lot of irrelevant material to find what you exactly need. I have spent countless hours listening to junk.

@AEon:

I kept the long names so that the original sounds can be identified/found on 'freesound' if you need them as reference. I am sure that when you use them you are free to rename them as long as you cite the original name when you credit the author. IMO you should mention 'freesound' in the credit statement because that is the authentic source (I just collected the sounds into an easy to use archive). If you also mention me, I will appreciate it, but you are not obliged to .

Speaker

[dichtfux]

Wow, that sounds like quite a bit of work. Thanks heaps for sharing the results with us!

[AEon]

I'll actually be keeping the long names, and have already found several sounds I'll be using in my maps. Very nifty

[sock]

@speaker, I only recently got back into editing my own sfx and I wanted something free to do simple cross fading, looping and splicing stuff together. Audacity certainly has a strange interface and not really intuitive to understand but like all software it is just a matter of time to get use to it, plus its F R E E to use. http://www.goldwave.com/ certainly looks awesome on features and also has a trial version but it does not say how crippled it is before you have to splash out 50 dollars on the full version.

The search facility at freesound is not that bad, you just need to think of keywords (which sometimes is the tricky bit) The website interface allows you to listen to all the sounds and you don't need to download any additional stuff or have any special software. One thing I did find extremely useful about the site is that authors stuff is always grouped together and they usually release packs of sounds to help with downloads. So once you find a good author you can find a lot of good stuff quickly.

[AEon]

Started to add sound from this pack to AEdm7, should yield some surprises, because we are so used to only hearing default id sounds. Very neat to have these.

[DTS]

Goldwave trial version isn't crippled, it just has nag pop-ups. It's a pretty nifty program, I recommend it.

[monaster]

Great work speaker!
Waited a long time for someone to actually do something like this, thanks!

[cityy]

Uh... I must have completely ignored this! Downloading, thanks speaker!

[skinNCNmaster]

Great idea guys..

I'm an ableton live user now too.. learning.. another large application with lots of features..

however, in my travels.. i've come upon this tool and found it works fine for some conversions..

Switch Sound File Converter - like winzip for registration - not necessary... keeps working anyway.

for sound editing.. goldwave is old school yeah.. recently wavosaur has my bacon.

http://www.wavosaur.com/