If you have read the first two articles in this series, hopefully you will have downloaded Yannic Cathalina's gracious Boeing 747, installed Freeware Works excellent panel and flown around admiring the result. If not, you will probably be rebuilding your hard disk and your relationship, but no-one said the best things in life should ever be easy.

Now if you are a discerning flightsimmer, you will have noticed something is wrong... something that is hard to put your finger on, but which leaves this setup just less than perfect. Yeah, that's right, the sound. There is no way that 747s make the horrible tinny whine that you have gotten used to hearing. They produce a a proper roar. In this lesson, we are going to go looking for a roar.

OK, so let's go to the FlightSim.Com search page and fix this whine but good. When you have got the page in view, I would like you to pull the slider in the top box down until you can select 'FS2000 sound' and type '747' in the box called 'Search for text,' before you hit the search key. You may wonder why we are being so selective and not searching for any 747 sound file, but in my experience sound sets from FS98 or before do not always work reliably with FS2000. Sometimes you get away with it, sometimes you don't; but since there is a good selection of FS2K 747 sounds around, we can afford to go for stuff we know is going to work.

The first thing that will strike you about the results of the search is just how big the zips are. This is not good news if you have a slow modem, but sadly it can't be helped. Take my word for it, there is no such thing as a small sound set, not if you want something worth listening to.

There are good reasons for sound sets being big: for a start, the 'wave' file format that FS2000 uses isn't very space efficient compared to more modern sound recording formats; second, the higher the quality of a sound sample the bigger it gets; third, the shorter a sample is, the more repetitive it is to listen to, which is an issue on any flight, not just long ones; and finally, the larger sound sets have greater numbers of different sounds in them, instead of cheating the way small sets do by modulating one base sound. The long and the short of it is that I don't think I have ever come across a good sound set that weighs in at less than 4 megs, although there must be some exceptions.

The sound set we want to download is called 7472ksnd.zip. If you have worked through the previous two articles in the series, uou should know how to get it, so I am going to cut down on the hand-holding and assume that you are on your way to becoming a power user.

Go back to the search page, delete anything you typed there before, and type '7472ksnd.zip' in the 'file name' box. Then hit the search button.

You should come up with one file in the list, a sound set by Mike Hambly. I've chosen this one, not only because Mike recorded it, but also because it is the smallest high quality sound set I can find (and believe me, I tested a few). There are some smaller sets out there, and maybe if you look hard enough you will find a good one, but at the time of writing, this was the 'best buy' in terms of bangs for bucks - it combines a relatively short download with some impressive sound. So we'll go for it.

Hit 'download' and go through the routine, making sure that you choose the download folder we created to save the file in. While we are waiting for it to download, I had better tell you that Mike is the king of the flight simulator sound recordists. If you see his name attached to a sound set, it is a winner; I can honestly say I haven't come across a dud Hambly sound set yet.

Incidentally, if you think this is a big sound set, the set I use is Mike's 747*2ksn.zip (replace the star with 'a' 'b' 'c' and 'd' to get all four files) which is a massive 17 megs of sheer hi-octane delight - and all of this fun is freeware. It might cost you nothing to download, but it took Mike many hours to record it and massage it to set it up so that it gives the best possibly results in Flight Simulator. So when we are done, make sure you email him and tell him how much you appreciated all that hard work.

All downloads have to end sooner or later, and eventually you will hear Windows beep at you and you can close down the download window, log off FlightSim.Com and shut down your web browser. It is always worth logging off FlightSim.Com, by the way, because if you just shut down your browser on the way out, the site will still think you are logged on, and if you need to access the web pages again you may come across a puzzling message saying that a user with your account name is still logged on, and you need to force him out. Well, that user is you! So remember to log off, if you can.

After shutting down your browser, have a look at your download directory using Windows Explorer. If you haven't been downloading other stuff, you should have three files there, and one of them should be 7472ksnd.zip.

Okay, so let's check out the contents of this zip file. Double click it and you should see something like this (see picture at right).

If you scroll up and down the file list, you should see a file called 747readme.txt. However experienced you become at installing FS add-ons, it is always good practice to find any documentation included in zips and to read it. You won't always want to follow the instructions (sometimes there won't be any), but it pays to check out any special requests the author of the package may have before you leap in. So we are going to have a look here.

One of the neat features on the WinZip interface is that you don't have to unzip files to look at them, and you can open 747readme just by double-clicking on it, unless you have one of those new-fangled single-click setups. The advantage of this is that it allows you to make sure you have everything you need to do an installation. If you don't, you can just shut down WinZip and get any missing files without having to remember where you are when you are half way through an installation.

The text file should open in Notepad, and while I would like you to read it, don't spend too much time on it, because we are going to do this installation by the book, which means doing it slightly differently to the way Mike's instructions suggest.

The quick way to install a sound set (it works for panels too) is just to unzip the whole lot into the sound folder of the aircraft you want, and as long as the set contains a valid sound.cfg, everything will work. The one problem with this method is that is you ever want to use the sound set for another 747, you will have to copy all the sound files into that aircraft's sound folder too, and with 20 Mb sound sets becoming more and more common, you had better have a lot of spare hard disk space if you plan to download more than a couple of different Jumbos.

The solution is to install the sound set in its own directory in \FS2000\fsfsconv and make the aircraft use it by setting up an alias in its sound.cfg file which points to the sound set in fsfsconv - using exactly the same method we did to install the panel in the last lesson. Using an fsfsconv alias gives us the greatest possible flexibility in using the sound set. We can associate it with as many aircraft as we like - and if we find a better set, we can install that in its own fsfsconv directory and then install it in the aircraft just by doing a single line edit in their sound.cfg files.

So go find the fsfsconv folder. As the illustration shows, the path is c:\program files\microsoft games\fs2000\aircraft\fsfsconv assuming you have used the default setup for FS2000. If you know enough to have used anything other than the default setup, you probably don't need to be reading this!

If you take a look in fsfsconv, you should be able to see the folder we used to install our 747 panel - what we are going to do is to create a new folder to keep our sound set in.

A few people seem to have trouble with creating new folders, so we will just go through it one more time here. With the \FS2000\fsfsconv folder hightlighted, left click on the file menu, wait for the drop-down menu to appear and left click on 'new,' then slide the mouse pointer and left click on 'folder.'

A brand new folder will appear, which Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, have chosen for once to give a sensible name to. After racking their brains in countless meetings and spending several hundred thousand dollars on outside consultant expertise, they decided to call it 'new folder.' Neat idea, huh? Don't enjoy it for too long, because we are going to have to rename it.

Immediately after you bring it into the world, the new folder should have its name surrounded in a rectangle, with the words 'new folder' highlighted in blue. If you see this, you can just type the new name in from the keyboad.

We are going to call this folder: sound.7472ksnd

Do not get this wrong. There are many things you can get wrong in life, and I have made my share of mistakes (some of them were more fun than others, but that is another story), but it is vital that you check this name is correct, because if the alias we are going to set up later doesn't match this folder name, things will not work out as planned and I might have to issue a demerit.

The reason for giving this folder such a complicated name, with that dot in the middle of it and all, may not be immediately obvious, but one day you may find you have dozens of downloaded panels and sound sets in fsfsconv and if you don't adopt a naming convention early on, you may find it difficult to work out what you are looking at in years to come.

You shouldn't have problems renaming the folder, but if you get called down for dinner at the wrong moment, or the phone goes, or the cat has a fit and you get distracted, the folder may not have a rectangle around the highlight and you won't be able to rename it just by typing. You can get the rectangle back by right-clicking on the folder icon, sliding the pointer down the drop-down menu that appears and left-clicking 'rename' and then typing in the new name.

With the sound.7472ksnd folder safely created, we can go back to our download folder, check for any open WinZip windows and shut them down and then open 7472ksnd.zip in WinZip.

Our next move is to hit the extract button and then use the 'folders/drive' box to select our new folder. The path is c:\program files\microsoft games\fs2000\aircraft\fsfsconv\sound.7472ksnd which will give your mouse some exercise as you expand the folders and pull the sliders so you can keep everything in view.

As soon as you can see the sound.7472ksnd folder in the directory tree, left click it to select it and then hit the extract button so unpack the files into it.

When the green light comes back on and WinZip is done, close it and go to the sound.7472ksnd folder using Windows Explorer, just to check that the files are all there.

You should see something like this image. If the folder is empty, you extracted the sound set somewhere else and I wish you luck in finding it.

The next step is a crucial one. Use Windows Explorer to collapse the fsfsconv folder hierarchy and open \FS2000\aircraft - then scroll down to our old friend the b7473sab folder and expand that so that you can see its sub-folders. You should see something like this image.

Now go to the sound folder and open it. There should be one file in there, called sound.cfg. It should have a little notepad icon in a white rectangle, which means it is 'associated' with Notepad and you can launch it by double clicking it. What we are going to do is to edit this file to point at the sound file folder we put in \FS2000\fsfsconv.

Open sound.cfg. The file should contain the following lines, which point at the default 737 sound file, which as I said earlier in this lesson when all of you were still awake, reminds me more of a vacuum cleaner than something you might fly thousands of miles in:

[fltsim]
alias=b737_400\sound

PAY ATTENTION BROWN! PUT THAT WOMAN DOWN OR I WILL SEE YOU AFTER CLASS!

Everyone awake? Good, because we do not want to get this bit wrong. I want you to change the lines in sound.cfg to read:

[fltsim]
alias=fsfsconv\sound.7472ksnd

Do not forget the full stop after the word sound and be VERY CAREFUL about your typing here, because if the folder name in sound.cfg does not match the folder name in fsfsconv exactly, your aircraft will disappear like the will 'o the wisp and you will not be able to find it in the select aircraft menu ever again, unless you go back and edit sound.cfg. Quite why FS2K reacts this strongly to a typo is beyond me, but it does, so take extra care here and triple check.

Then save the file.

Now start up FS2K, switch to our Sabena 747 and get ready to send Mike Hambly [mhambly@flightsim.com] an email telling him what a wonderful guy he is for making this sound set available as freeware, because the noise you are hearing guys and gals, is a proper Boeing 747 sound, and if I wasn't Scots, it would make me feel proud to be an American.

If you want to hear it even better, change to a spot plane view, but get ready to step back a little, as I don't want you getting sucked down those intakes. You can do this by going to the FS2000 menu and clicking 'Views' and then 'View Options,' making sure you have 'spot plane' checked and then altering the distance setting to about 600 feet. The default of 145 is fine for a Cessna, but too close to a seven forty seven for comfort.

Now relax, turn the speakers up loud, and push those throttles wide open. Is that not a fine noise? Is the world a good place, or no?

Andrew Herd
andrew.herd@btinternet.com