Thinking about making a GTR2 sound mod

Recently, I found the "Sounds of GTR2" (https://www.racedepartment.com/downloads/sounds-of-gtr2.22872/) sound mod for all the original content cars in GTR2, and was really hyped to try it. Just did, and I wasn't impressed. I had deluded myself into thinking it might be kinda rough, but somewhat comparable to the sounds for the RSS GT pack for AC, for example – NOPE, it's definitely not even close.

But it got me thinking: the only thing not yet upgraded in the Anniversary Patch and HQ MODS (I believe) is the engine sounds. Perhaps it's time we tried to bring the sounds of GTR2 into the 2020s?

So before going to sleep, I dug around for some YouTube videos that could serve as high-quality samples for onboard sounds. And there's a fair amount out there, especially for some cars. I'll post these links below. Some of these will be well-known to many out there, but others are recent additions to the world of YouTube onboards!
 
Ferrari 550 (my personal favourite FYI :p)

Lister Storm
NOTE: this car seems extraordinarily hard to find decent onboards for... this, as far as I could tell, is the ONLY one of any quality on YouTube

Reiter Murcielago
 
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Nice videos ;)

You know very few people are capable of doing that in pro quality (I am not) : you can count these people on 1 hand for gtr2 and all are retired now.
THE SPECIALIST, as he is sound engineer, is @DucFreak : his PnG3 engine sounds are outstanding but he has totally abandoned GTR2 now so there is quite no chance that he will rework GTR2 sounds one day :(
 
Thanks for chiming in, @GTR233. :) Too bad to hear the legends aren't into sound modding GTR2 anymore...

If nobody else is going to do it, then I'd may as well take a crack at doing one of these cars to start with – see if I can learn. So that means the 550 Prodrive hee hee :D

But although I've done lots of audio editing with music etc. I've never done anything like this before. Would love to get involved, but my problem will be the lack of resources on how to do it. The basic strategy (I believe) of how to go from original video to loopable sound samples is the same for any game e.g. cut at the top of the waveform.
 
Before I forget – just found a few Viper onboards hidden in this FIA GT Enna Pergusa 2002 broadcast (look at 10:06, for example). Thought I should share, as it seems to be another car that's hard to find half-decent sound sources for:

 
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For those curious, I also just found the following resources for on how to do sound modding for AC from two masters – Fonsecker and SHR Modding. This is not the same as doing it for GTR2 of course, but it should be of some help.

Fonsecker working through a FXX sound mod live

First of five tutorials in a playlist by SHR Modding
 
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That would be amazing. I've always thought sim engines sounded like vacuum cleaners even on the latest sims with all their pings and reverb they don't sound like real life onboards on youtube.

There's a Ford Mustang in one of the mods I have that has an absolutely ridiculously good engine note. From time to time I come across other mods that are just on another level. I should find that and post it.

Good luck!
 
That would be amazing. I've always thought sim engines sounded like vacuum cleaners even on the latest sims with all their pings and reverb they don't sound like real life onboards on youtube.

There's a Ford Mustang in one of the mods I have that has an absolutely ridiculously good engine note. From time to time I come across other mods that are just on another level. I should find that and post it.

Good luck!

Thank you for the well-wishes mate! Long-time admirer of your work keeping GTR2 alive. Here's hoping I can do a small part to the do the same. :thumbsup:

Ooh, please do post a vid of that (or the mod itself – if you'd be allowed to share it publicly of course).

And if you @Shovas, or anyone else who reads this, happen to ever come across any nice sounding onboards I (or someone else in the future) could use for original GTR2 content cars, please do share! Would definitely help make the job easier.
 
I had some more fun tonight listening to beautiful cars... man, I'm so glad I thought of an excuse to do this. Such amazing noises!

Corvette C5R
This has to be the best recorded, cleanest sounding onboard I've ever heard... crystal clear (and ferocious). Plus, the guy is driving it like he stole it!

Porsche 993 GT2
 
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Nissan 350Z (from the wrong time period, but I'm hoping the sound would be close enough)

TVR Tuscan or T400R
Note that the Tuscan above isn't precisely a T400R I don't think, but the sound seems close enough
 
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And some Viper onboards of decent quality:

Who knows why, but other than the more obscure cars like the Gillet or Morgan, the Viper seems to be the hardest to find a high-quality faithful onboard recording for. Weird.

Anyways, this'll be the last post with possible sound sources – I swear!! I apologize for filling up anyone's noti box unnecessarily. However, I'm assuming I don't have to apologize for sharing some YT vids with incredible sounding cars... :p
 
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So I did some digging yesterday to find some information on sound modding for gmotor2, and found a useful starter's guide on the HistorX forum from 2010 (which has somehow still survived, thank goodness). Note that for GTR2, I believe the .aud file it the equivalent of the .sfx file in rF – otherwise, the information should carry over directly from one sim to another (and probably to GSC and AMS as well). Big thank you to Rantam, the author of the post. I've copied it below to preserve it for the future, and so others on RD might find it.


Hi there,
some of you have asked some information about how to create engine sounds for rFactor. I have to admit I'm not an expert creating engine sounds, but did some before we got the huge talent of Wolferl with us, so here are some tips to start:
- Chose a car already done which has sounds you like.
- Go to the folder where this car is stored in the mod (usually Gamedata/vehicles/historic gt/historical fia gt/...)
- Open the .sfx file of this car. On this file you'll find all the information related to the sounds of the car (samples used and their location in the file structure, different parameters, etc). There are other files which are important for sounds (engine, for example), but that .sfx is where you should take a look to start.
- Summarizing, there're 3 kind of sounds defined in that file:
a) engine sound for outside view
b) engine for cockpit view
c) sound effects (surfaces, crashes, horn, etc).
For a) and b) there're two sounds subgroups:
- power (when you're pressing the throttle)
- coast (when you release the throttle)
Being the reason that the engine sounds different on these situations.
If you go to the folder where the samples are stored (you can see the path in the .sfx file) you can listen these samples to have a better understanding of what i mean.
- Probably you've already noticed that rF generates the full RPM range of the engine just using 4-5 samples recorded at different RPMs.
- The samples are in .wav format. Take a look to the properties of the sounds (bit rate, etc) so you know how to save them once you create your own ones.
Now that you've seen how the sounds are defined in rF is time for you to do your own ones:
- First, you need an audio editor to create/edit the samples. Audacity is a good option for starters: is free (opensource), not very complex, but powerful enough for this task.
- Then you need samples to create your own engine sound. You can get these samples recording them by yourself, or if you don't have such option using the ones you may find in different resources (documentaries, YouTube, etc). We'll use this last option as example, as in most of cases you won't have access to the original car to do the recording on your own.
- Go to YouTube/Vimeo and search videos of the car. Remember you have to create sounds for both cockpit and external sounds, and for the two kind of subgroups: power and coast. So, these are 4 group of samples in total. That means you may need to find different videos to cover all of them. Anyway, let's focus just on power sounds recorded from cockpit.
- Try to search long recordings where all the RPM range is used. Much better if the engine is kept at the same RPMs for some time at some moments.
- Once you've got the audio track of the video (you can convert the video's sound to .wav or other sound format using free applications you'll find on the Net, just google them) then you have to 'extract' different samples from it, each one of them recorded at constant RPMs, so you can 'rebuild' the full RPM range. For example: Idle, 2000rpm, 4000 rpm, 6000 rpm and limiter (this is just an example, depending on the engine, the recording you got, etc. you may need or would be forced to use sounds recorded at different RPMs, a higher/lower number of samples, etc).
- Is important that every sample stores the engine at constant RPMs, because they will be used to create loops. Imagine you're running the car in rFactor and you are at 2000rpm steadily. In this case rF would use a sample as a loop, playing it again and again until you increase or reduce the RPMs. If the sample wouldn't contain a sound of the engine at constant speed you would notice easily that what you're hearing in game is a sample played once and again. In the other hand, if it contains the engine recorded at constant speed then it will be much more difficult to know that's just a loop. The longer the sample is the better the result is also (in most of cases): if the sample is just 1 second you would hear it 60 times if you drive at constant rpms during a minute. But if the player contains 10 seconds of recording then you'd only hear it 6 times, which would reduce the 'loop' effect.
- The last step would be to define the transitions between the samples so the engine sounds on a credible way when you press or lift the throttle. You have to do that in the .sfx file, where the mix(transition) parameters for each sample are defined. It looks something like this:
EngineRPMcoastInside=2
{
MinimumRPM=3900.00 // must overlap properly
MaximumRPM=5900.00 // must overlap properly
NaturalRPM=7500.00 // engine RPM at which sample was recorded
}
Basically there you define when a sample fades in when it fades out. As this is defined for each sample in the end what you're doing is generating the transitions, where two samples are being mixed/overlapped (one is fading in while the other is fading out). Let me illustrate it with the following image:

Well, there're more things in that .sfx than the explained here, but this was just an introduction for those of you who want to start doing sounds for rFactor (most of this is also applicable for other gMotor2 games and almost to every sim out there).
Any correction or comment just let me know. As i said I'm not a guru of sounds so I might be mistaken in some of the things i wrote.
Anyway, hope you found it interesting
 
Read further down the thread the guide above is from, and other tutorials used to exist, but are now dead links.

Yet another reason to be sad about the demise of NoGrip... @DucFreak had actually put together a tutorial for GTR2/rF sound modding and posted it at this location: http://www.nogripracing.com/forum/showthread.php?t=21694&highlight=sound+tutorial

Also, apparently there was a tutorial on the ISI forums at one time by Bee at this location: http://isiforums.net/f/showthread.p...istict-of-car-external-sounds?p=2261#post2261

It's a long shot, but anyone here on RD (for example @Jon c or @GTR233) from the NoGrip days happen to have saved DucFreak's tutorial (or the ISI forum one) somewhere? I'm guessing not, but never hurts to ask, just in case.
 
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No sadly I don't have that :(

I have tweaked aud files in hq patch : added brakes sounds, added external tranny, added horn sound, rearranged the sounds between cars, increased max limit to avoid cut-off and increased tranny sounds on some cars which were too low...but of course I use stock gtr2 sounds.

You can also buy RaceOn which has got much better sounds than gtr2 then copy wav+aud files in gtr2.

From what you posted above, you can start to work on this project : it will be a lot of trials-errors at beginning, as in modding in general, but with time and lot of efforts you can do something so, as Shovas said, good luck on your sound project ;)
 
No sadly I don't have that :(

I have tweaked aud files in hq patch : added brakes sounds, added external tranny, added horn sound, rearranged the sounds between cars, increased max limit to avoid cut-off and increased tranny sounds on some cars which were too low...but of course I use stock gtr2 sounds.

You can also buy RaceOn which has got much better sounds than gtr2 then copy wav+aud files in gtr2.

From what you posted above, you can start to work on this project : it will be a lot of trials-errors at beginning, as in modding in general, but with time and lot of efforts you can do something so, as Shovas said, good luck on your sound project ;)

No worries! :) Was worth a shot, just in case.

Really appreciate all the work you've done on the HQ patch and mods, including with the sounds – I'll 100% be taking the HQ files as a starting point, and more or less only work on integrating the engine sounds from vids like those above.

Thanks for the RaceOn tip! I haven't picked that up yet, so I'll grab that soon and check out the sound files, see if there's anything I can learn from them. Got me thinking – it'd probably also make sense (in the future) to dig through some of the better sounds from AMS mods and see what I can learn.

Exactly, I've got enough to get started. I'll start small (interior engine sounds only, one car) and update here on my progress as I go!
 

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