Adding Sounds

Adding Sounds

There will come a time when your units are inside the mod and you want to give them your own voices as was with the case with me, when I wanted the units to speak in Urdu. This little guide will help you do just that.

First of all, you will require two software namely Audacity and XCC Mixer

You can get Audacity from this page and the XCC Mixer from this one.

Now go into your mod directory and if you have not already added the voices.yaml file, then add it. Open the file and you will see this code:

GenericVoice:
	Variants:
		soviet: .r01,.r03
		allies: .v01,.v03
	Voices:
		Select: await1,ready,report1,yessir1
		Move: ackno,affirm1,noprob,overout,ritaway,roger,ugotit
		Die: dedman1,dedman2,dedman3,dedman4,dedman5,dedman7,dedman8
		Burned: dedman10
		Zapped: dedman6
	DisableVariants: Die, Burned, Zapped

What this means is that for the soviets, the sounds that are used have the extensions .r01 and .r03; similarly allies have .v01, .v03

Then under Voices: we see the names of the files. await1 means that there are two sound files await1.r01 and await1.r03 that are being used by the soviets whenever the user selects an infantry unit. Keep in mind that these are generic voices for soviet infantry.

What we want to do is to replace await1.r01 and await1.r03 with our own files.

First of all, we open Audacity. Press the red circular record button, wait for a few seconds and then say your line. We waited a few seconds because you might get noise from mic which we want to eliminate. Now select the section that has nothing by noise, then go to Effects>Noise Removal and select Get Noise Profile. Then select the entire sound file and select Noise Removal again. This time just select OK. You will see that the noise will be removed from the sound file. Just play around with it till you find the sound that satisfies you.Export it as WAV and you are done with Audacity. Now open the XCC Mixer.

In the XCC Mixer you will have 3 columns. The left most is where we will work, the middle one is where we will get our output files. Now browse to the appropriate location in both the columns, that is, in the left column, the location where your files are and the middle column where you want to put the generated files.

Now select the WAV file which I believe you have named await1.wav, right click on it and then select Copy as AUD. This will generate a file named await1.aud.

We are almost done now. Just go to the location where await1.aud is and rename it to await1.r01. You can also make a copy and rename that to await1.r03. Copy both the files and put them in the bits folder of your mod. Thus, we replaced one of the generic sounds with our sound and the game should work without any trouble.