Tutorial: Creating custom engine sound properties using Audacity

Started by SolarStorm327, May 26, 2020, 12:37:30 PM

Previous topic - Next topic
I've been messing around with creating custom vehicle engine sound properties in Audacity based on Battlefront's layered engine sounds (e.g. eng_interceptorTank_hi_lp, eng_interceptorTank_med_lp, and eng_interceptorTank_low_lp).

With enough experimenting, I figured out how to my own layered engine sounds and thought I'd share the process I used to make those sounds. This process is fairly short and easy to accomplish. The end result vehicle engine sounds can be used for both Star Wars: Battlefront (2004) and Star Wars: Battlefront II (2005). This tutorial should be useful for those who want to make their own vehicle sound effects for their own mods and maps.

Requirements:
-Audacity (Freely obtainable audio editing software)
-A looped 22050Hz .wav file of your choosing
(NOTE: the sound file doesn't have to be 22050Hz, but this is what I used in the process)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

To create the "low" engine sound; drag your sound file onto Audacity, highlight it, go under "tracks", click resample, resample your sound to 1000Hz (you may need to manually type it in). When you're done, export the .wav file as eng_yourVehicleNameHere_low_lp (I like to stick to naming conventions used by Battlefront's sound files).

You can create the "med" engine sound using the same process as the "low" engine sound. The only difference here is resampling the sound to 8000Hz.

The creation of the "hi" engine sound uses a different process through the "Vocal Remover" effect. Resample your sound to 44100Hz, highlight your sound, and copy & paste your sound track to make a second track. Click the down arrow next to your top sound track's file name and click "Make Stereo Track" to merge the two tracks together (this is needed to apply the vocal remover effect). With your new stereo track; highlight it, go under "Effect" and click "Vocal Remover" at the bottom of the list. Adjust the "Frequency Band" from 600.0Hz to 8000.0Hz and click OK. Click the down arrow on your stereo track and click "Split Stereo to Mono" and remove one of the two tracks. Export your sound accordingly.