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Showing results for tags 'sound'.
Found 14 results
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69 downloads
For the flyable Ilyushin Il-18D model by NAVYNK. Completed version available HERE. Notice that I have added an additional files: aircraft.cfg and .air file. You have to transfer .air into your Il-18D package and replace it. Then copy all notes from my aircraft.cfg and paste into the same file of your package after deleting all sections except [fltsim] notes. That files contain more correct Il-18D and AI-20M dynamics. A flight manual (Russian) in the pack. By Kogut's Simworks (me). -
143 downloads
For using with Mike Stone's flyable model and Fraser McKay panel design version 6.0, May 2011. By Kogut's Simworks (me). -
80 downloads
For the flyable Antonov An-12BK model by Vladimir Zhygulsky. Last completed version available HERE. Notice that I have added an additional files: aircraft.cfg and .air file. You have to transfer .air into your An-12 package and replace it. Then copy all notes from my aircraft.cfg and paste into the same file of your package after deleting all sections except [fltsim] notes. That files contain more correct An-12BK and AI-20M dynamics. By Kogut's Simworks (me). -
Hello Guys, For the life of me, I cannot remember, how we made custom VOC sounds loop endlessly... There is a Creative Utility called JOINTVOC.EXE but it only allows repeats up to 99 times, as far as I can see... Can anyone out there possibly remember how to get a VOC to loop endlessly for engine sound in FS4 with SGA Upgrade... Thanks in advance for any help. Kindest Regards, - Mic FS4 Webport planetmic.com/fs4 I found the answer to this! how_to_loop_voc_file_for_fs4.txt -
For me installation and setup went quite well. I did a few short orientation flights and then tried out the A320. As a long time user of the PMDG 737, the default A320 was different and I'm still not sure what really works and what doesn't (mainly with the FMC as it's different than the one in the 737). So, I'm not sure what is a bug, what is turned off and what is just my lack of experience with the aircraft. But, I digress - just sharing... My main issue for this thread is that I'm getting an audible voice from ATC or "myself" only about 10% of the time. I can see the text scrolling, but you only hear the mic chirp - no voice. 10% of the time its fine. Is anyone else experiencing this problem? Any solutions out there? Thanks Bryan -
Hello FS Community, I have been struggling to find good condensed, cheap headsets that give that similar sound to a real pilot in the cockpit on frequency. An example of what I'm talking about is AviationPro. In his Vatsim flights he uses a headset that sounds very similar to how they sound on freq. Are there any easy to use softwares that can replicate this e.g. Not audacity? Or any cheapish headsets online? Thank you Snoot
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I've posted on here about this issue before but hoping someone will have some insight. I have noticed that some (not all) of my aircraft have very low engine sound levels when viewed from the "tower view". I am not talking about when you are flying farther away. I mean right over the top and low. Almost silent. Some of my aircraft are perfect. This seems to be on both payware and freeware aircraft. An example would be with any of Milton Shoupe's beautiful freeware planes. They sound perfect from the "tower view". And change perfectly depending on how far away you are. An example of it not sounding right would be the Golden Age Simulations freeware Curtis Robin. It sounds great until you go to "tower view" and you can barely hear it. And this can be while still on the ground parked next to the tower. So my question here is two fold: 1) Has anyone else had this issue before? 2) How do I fix this? (with description please) Look forward to hearing any thoughts and help. Tom
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/images/notams/notams19/just1009.jpgEver wondered what's involved in getting accurate audio for youraircraft add-ons? Well here's just as glimpse of what it takes by way of a blog fromone of our current sound artists - Sim Acoustics, who are recordingand supplying the sounds for our forthcoming DR400. Enjoy the read... https://www.simacoustics.com/2019/10/04/the-robin-s-song/ Source Just Flight Previews Robin DR400 Earlier this year, we also published an article on Flight Simulator Audioby Aaron Swindle of Skysong Soundworks. You can read that articlehere.
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Flight Simulation Audio By Aaron Swindle/Skysong Soundworks I would like to start off by naming some of the people that have pioneered and contributed to simulation audio through the years: Vance Dylan (Sonic Solutions), Mike Hambly (BASF), Christoffer Peterson (TSS), Ted Tufun Wolfgang, Benoit Plamondon and myself. Let's talk a bit about hearing. For the most part people have a normal measurable base-line of hearing sound. As we age our hearing changes, depending on how much we've been exposed to elongated periods of loud noises; high pitched noise can be especially hard on our inner ear. I myself have suffered from tinnitus for most of my life. Tinnitus comes in many forms--high pitched ringing, cricket noises, low diesel engine rumble sounds, and other odd hearing anomalies. Mine was mostly caused by damge I sustained as an infant from two bouts of meningitis. Tinnitus is a condition caused by damage to the tiny hair cells in the inner ear. Once these cells are damaged the sound is not processed as it should be, and the brain is constantly looking for a signal that is not there. It's like the feedback from a hot amplifier. I wear a hearing aid in my left ear with a built in tone generator, it provides feedback to the brain and eases the symptoms. No matter your age I sincerely caution you to wear ear protection around loud noise; once you incur hearing damage it can not be regained. I include a Sound Warning in all of my sound sets to alert people about protecting their hearing. Sound Memory We all have sound memory. When we pick up the phone we know who it is by the sound of the person's voice. Those of us that work on cars, trucks, aircraft, farm equipment, can recognize when an engine is not hitting on all the cylinders. Engine sound has a particular rhythm and lope. We know when a lifter is not properly adjusted, it ticks to let us now it needs attention. The same applies to electric motors, we instinctively know when the brushes are worn or the main shaft bearings have had it. We use our sound memory to intuit and diagnose these type of issues. What Makes Sound Interesting? Why does a particular song make it to number one, and others stay farther down on the charts? The content of the lyrics, guitar riffs, the bass line? Yes, it's all of these combined. Music has the ability to evoke emotions, life memories, good feelings in most of us. Aircraft sounds have this same essence. Almost all us aviation enthusiasts know the sound of a Pratt & Whitney radial engine. Nothing else in the world of sound comes close to the rumble of all those cylinders firing in a timed sequence. There are so many recognizable layers as you listen to those enormous aircraft engines. The twill and whispering of the prop tips, the rich bass of the exhaust, the whine of the turbo-chargers, the chest rumbling bass as she flies by at 250 knots. That cacophony of sounds does something to me that I can't quite explain to the people standing around watching with me. To the people reading this article I don't have to try and explain it to you...it's an unspoken shared experience, and you know what I am talking about here. Flight Simulator Sound Engine Beginnings I first encountered Microsoft Flight Simulation back in 1986. I went to my brother's house before I deployed in the military. He pulled up a wire frame Flight Simulator that really caught my attention. Somewhere around 1994 I enrolled in a community college here in Virginia, and one day that same old 486 computer showed up Fedex on my door step. Back then it was all Prompt and DOS commands, 12 megs of RAM! Between bouts of studying I would pull up the simulator and fiddle around with it. In a few years a newer version of Flight Simulator hit the market. I immediately noticed a vast improvement in the sound of the aircraft and enviornment. Somehow I found FlightSim.Com and began trading e-mails with Mike Hambly. He was already editing and making improvements to the sounds in the simulator. He told me where to download a freebie sound editor, we were off to the races from there. Mike and I traded tips and sound files for many years. Making It All Come Together As far as I can intuit there are three parts to the sound engine in Microsoft Flight Simulator: The Edlin Language (Sound Config) Sound Source (Wav files) and the Base Code that knits these elements together to create the looping audio we hear when we fire up the program. As the simulator evolved the sound configuration became more complex and added more tools to work with. The sound engine now has the ability to produce a morphed (stereo effect) for multi-engine aircraft and other simulation vehicles. Producing sound packages with rich realistic character is not just a matter of slapping a bunch of sound files together and calling it good. Due to the nature of the sound engine you have to learn to create actual work arounds to produce work that is accurate and pleasing to the end user. The advent of sound cones is a good example of this process. To employ this tool you have to create a volume and sound type differential. As you rotate around the aircraft the sound engine has to be able to read and identify the differential you created with the sound files. It can be a daunting task. Chris of TSS came along and really perfected this with his vast catalogue of jet aircraft sound packages. He has an impeccable ear, and the editing skills to make it all work together in a seamless fashion. Chris did teach this old sound dog some new tricks! Sound Cards And Polish There are many different sound cards on the market to choose from. I have always used Sound Blaster. Their cards have a built in amplifier plus crisp accurate sound reproduction. It used to be we sound guys were always fighting with the looping pop issue. It was a fly in the ointment for a very long time. Most of this issue was caused by deep bass sounds that would make a popping sound as they cycled from the beginning of the file to the end. The newer sound cards eventually solved this editing anomaly for us. Before I release an audio package I spend many hours beta testing it and listening for anything undesireable. Since there are many complex layers in aircraft sounds I check them in multiple situations, views, and at many different volume levels. Once I've done all that I adjust the final release volume to accomodate the average PC sound system. If you do run a Bass Kicker on your sound system you will find that I've left in plenty of wall rattling sound for you. As for sound systems I recommend any of the Logitech surround systems. They generally run less than $75.00 and produce excellent sound. If you run your simulator for hours on end you might begin to notice some audio degredation is occurring. Even with a high end system this can occur after lenghthy sessions. A system reboot almost always cures this as it replenishes the available memory and system resources. Closing Can you make a bunch of money producing audio packages? No! Back when I was working with multiple development groups we sometimes could make some decent profits. Those days have long since passed and a lot of the folks I worked with have closed their development companies. These days the expenses of production actually outpace any profit I might make on the end. We all have jobs, most pay us by the hour. When you buy one of my sound packages you are really just paying an expense for web-space or a new piece of editing software. I spend more on add-on aircraft than I'll ever make back. That is okay by me, I still enjoy what I do and plan to keep producing work for as long as possible. I hope this article sheds a little light on some murky corners. It's been many years since I've written about my little peice of the FS world. I hope you enjoyed reading it. Blue Skies To My Fellow Pilots. And thank you Nels for the space you provide to all of us here at FlightSim.Com. Sincerely, Aaron Swindle Skysong Soundworks Editor's Note: For nearly twenty years now Aaron has been supplying the flightsim community with improved sounds, as part of larger design teams and on his own, both as freeware and payware. View Aaron's Freeware Sounds
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/images/notams/notams18/milv0822.jpgIn a brief announcement on their Facebook page, Milviz hasrevealed that they are developing a new physics-based custom soundengine for the upcoming F-15C. If you have Facebook, you can view avideo that demonstrates it. Source
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FS Sound Mysteries Not So Mysterious By Aaron R. Swindle, Skysong Soundworks Hello fellow simmers, I figured it was way past time for me to add my two cents into the FS info pool. First a quick bit about how I got started in the audio side of flightsimming. I remember my very first encounter with FS, I think it was Version 4.0 or something like that. I was at my brother's house and he was messing around with his first P.C. and he was showing me a few games he had on his drive. I think the machine was a 386 with 12 mb of RAM. Yikes! Just as we were about to cut the P.C. off he said oh, check out this flying simulator. I took the stick and got the Cessna 150 off the runway just fine. The first thing I noticed was the lack of decent sound for the Cessna's engine; it sounded like cards in a bicycle spoke. I did not realize it then, but I would inherit that same P.C. years later after I got out of the U.S.M.C. to use for college studies. After I had completed my military service it was time for me to attend college. My brother sent me the old 386 still loaded with the same hard drive I'd seen years before. I'm sure it was Windows 3.0, DOS based now that I think about it. Geeez, I'm carbon dating myself here! Anyhow I began to play with the various programs and experiment with the code a bit here and there. It was a little different from the cable TV equipment I had been trained on for so many years. It took me a while to update myself with the current technology, but I got there okay. I think that must have been 1993 if I remember right. One afternoon I just happen to pull up that old flying simulator game and quickly became mesmerized by what I was seeing. I thought to myself, this thing is going to be around for a while--little did I know. It was about this time Flight Simulator 5.1 hit the shelf. I went out and got the new version ASAP. Again I was struck with the idea of how much better the sounds could be if only I had a sound editor and a "little time" to work with it. It was soon after I purchased 5.1 I plugged into the internet. I quickly discovered there was a growing community of P.C. addicts like myself that were immersed in the "Flying Game". I happened upon one of Mike Hambly's sound sets a few days later. I can't even remember what the file was, but the sound improvement was great. Having started playing guitar and singing at age 15 my ears were tuned to correct pitch and volume. I did an internet search and found a freebie sound editor soon after. That was 10 years ago. I'm still grinding out sound sets after all this time. Nuff about me! Creating Sound Sets One of the questions I get asked the most is, is it possible to get the wind sound against the landing gear once it has been lowered? Yes, but you have to program a gauge to call up the sound file. Why? Due to the "looping" effect in the FS sound engine. It's the same as double clicking a normal .wav file in Windows with any sound manager. Something has to start and stop the sound file. Why can't you do it in the sound cfg? There are no timer switches or commands in the cfg to control the operation of the .wav files. I'm sure it could be done by Microsoft if they took an interest in making the improvement. Maybe they will. Lets take a quick look at an example of the sound cfg itself: [WIND_SOUND] filename=wind3 <---Calls up the specified .wav file to be played. minimum_volume=6000 <---Lowest volume while on the ground and in flight. maximum_volume=8500 <---Loudest you want FS to play the .wav file. minimum_rate=0.60 <---Speed and intensity of .wav file low end. maximum_rate=0.90 <---Speed and intensity of .wav file high end. minimum_speed=40.0 <---FS will activate specified .wav file at this mininum kts. maximum_speed=120.0 <---FS will stop building intensity of wav file at this maximum kts. You can play with the above parameters quite a bit to suit your sound system and personal liking. It's important to remember that all humans have different audio interpretations depending on factors like hearing loss, sound system, P.C. speed, and imagination. Lets look at another part of the sound cfg: [SOUND_ENGINE] number_of_engines=1 <---Self explanatory eng1_combustion=COMBUSTION.1.00 <---Refers to the (bass) end of the .wav file. eng1_starter=starter <---Turning the key in the ignition initial start sequence. eng1_combustion_start=combstart <---Kicks on the bass end of the sound environment. eng1_shutdown=shutdown <---Self explanatory eng1_prop=PROP.1.00 <---Refers to the (whispy prop sounds) eng1_non_combustion=NON_COMBUSTION.1.00 <---Refers to the prop turning sounds if ignition is cut during flight. (Kalunk) (Kalunk) FS has the ability to play at least two-three sounds at the same time. Depending on how you program the volume of the first and secondary .wav files the FS sound engine will gradually begin to override the weaker specified volume in the sound cfg. Yet another part of the sound cfg: [COMBUSTION.1.00] filename=ce1a <---Specifies which .wav file you want to play. flags=0 <---Tells the sound engine what type of operation to perform in a given view. viewpoint=1 <---Inside view 2=outside view. rparams=0.000000,1.000000,0.264000,1.110000 <---Tells the sound engine what idle rpm you want the .wav file to be played at. vparams=0.000000,53.600000,0.174000 <---Tells the sound engine how loud or soft to play the wav file; this has limitations. link=COMBUSTION.1.01 <---Links you to the next part of the sound cfg. It's important to know that 95% of rpm and sound volume are controlled by the actual sound editing that is done by the developer. Small changes can be affected by playing with the above parameters, but not a lot. The audio developer must work within the basic written code. Why do certain sound sets sound different in other aircraft of the same category? I've studied this as much as I can and have found it has a lot to do with how the .air file is written. Why does the Beechcraft Baron 58 have such a big hollow sound? If you'll look at the sound cfg you'll see that each .wav file for the engine is called up twice. I've found that even the add-on twins seem to have the same anomaly associated with them. Big mystery? No, I think Microsoft just wrote it into the original code for the sim program. What about loss of ATC and other sounds with certain sound sets? Now this is a bit of a mystery for the most part. I think I may have a partial explanation though. Only a handful of folks complained to me about this. I noticed it was mainly happening on a four engine jet configuration. One, it may be that the individual end user has an older sound card that is not capable of full duplex. Duplex means two. If his or her system is already playing engine whine, combustion, and wind sound it may be the sound card has just run out of resources. Most that complained stated they still got the text version of the ATC. The other possibility is the DirectX issue may cause some machines to perform sub-standard operations depending on the application that is being run. Nothing really wrong with the machine, it may just need an update of software. Lastly, Microsoft has never produced a four engine aircraft for the sim; it may be that we are stepping on the program's toes trying a four engine cfg. How do you get real life aircraft sounds to sound right in the sim? This is the biggest and most often asked question I receive from fellow simmers. Think of a cartoon, now think of the background music in the cartoon. Part of what makes you laugh are the sound effects. Zing, pang, pow, zoooom, etc...accompanied by some goofy sounding orchestra that's gone crazy. When Bugs Bunny grabs Elmer Fud and starts waltzing around to regular correctly played orchestra music it's twice as funny. Why? Because your ears tell you it does not fit. It's much the same with producing real sounding audio for FS. This is where the rubber meets the tarmac. Although FS is not a cartoon, it's an animation. Therefore the sounds are going to be a little more animated than in real life. Most times this means eliminating certain undesirable qualities in the sound bite. Background noise is the most difficult characteristic to deal with. Here and there a simmer will send me a good sounding engine noise for a prop or jet, but most of the time I can't use it due to some unwanted background noise. Who wants to listen to a bird chirping or conversation looped over and over mixed in with an engine sound? Not me. Whats the solution? IMAGINATION. I can usually get my hands on 4-5 seconds of clean sound and I can build the sound set from there. If I've never heard the aircraft before, I can go out to the airport and listen to similar aircraft and get a close idea and ear memory of what the aircraft sounds like. Sometimes I will record the sounds and study them over and over, then compare them with what I produce with my sound editing equipment. Yes, sometimes you can get clean high quality digital sound bites to work with, but that's the exception, not the rule. Even then you can't just name the sound files, cram them into a sound folder and get the result you want. Due to the nature of the FS sound engine much editing has be be done to get the sounds to behave in the sim like you want them to. Bass, treble, and mid-range all have to be quartered and arranged so they will play equally with good quality to boot. For example the DreamFleet Cessna 310L sounds were around 8-10 re-mastering sessions total for me. Time consuming? You bet. Trial and error until it gets dark outside. How do I record sounds from a prop aircraft? Let's say you have a digital Sony audio recorder or a nice video recorder. The first thing to do is leave your friends in the hangar, otherwise they'll talk while you record and foul the session. Stand 20-25 feet at a right angle to the front of the aircraft, not behind the wing. Prop wash will ruin what you are trying to capture. Have the pilot start the aircraft. Stop, listen to your recording, how does it sound? Clean, garbled, too much bass, tinny? Adjust your audio settings and distance from the aircraft. Try again. Once you've established an optimal setting for your equipment have the pilot up the rpm for 8-10 second intervals until he reaches full throttle. Record the shutdown and there you have it. Note, try to be (very) still with your recording equipment, keep your hands still and don't rub them around on the recorder or camera. The mic will pick up every tiny sound of the structure of the device. Inside the aircraft, same type methods, trial and error mostly. Jet aircraft sounds are a little more difficult to record, again trial and error. Well I hope I've answered some of your long standing questions and cleared up a few of those sound mysteries. I can't say enough thanks to the sim community for all the kind and encouraging e-mails over the years. Thanks from Ole Stretch**** "that other sound guy." Aaron R. Swindle Skysong Soundworks ARSpilot@netscape.net -
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How To Build Your Own Aircraft Part 3: How To Install FS2000 Sound Files By Andrew Herd 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 -
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