Syrinscape - music - sound effects

[adminwheel3]

Talk on another thread got me thinking about the sonic environment for my game. I don't have a perfect solution for both music and voice yet, however in my research I came across a couple of nice sites/utilities for people who want to enhance the sounds for their game.

First is Syrinscape. https://syrinscape.com/
This handly little program is free to use but I highly recommend donating to the creator via papal if you like it. Basically it's a very easy to use mixing board where you can set up six banks of sounds.

Two are defined as loops - these are your background noises (wind, insects, rain) which are on all the time. The other banks are set for effects. Each effect group (e1,e2,e3,e4) has .wav or .ogg files that make it up. The program then randomly picks an effect from each group, plays it, pauses for a length of time you set and then picks another from the group.

For example I have set up a night time camp scene. So I want some soft music, campfire noises and nightime forest noises. I might have a 'soundscape' like this:

loop1 - campfire.wav
loop2 - wind.wav
e1 - owl1.wav
e1 - owl2.wav
e1 - distant wolf.wav
e2 - insects.wav
e2 - cuckcoo.wav
e3 - horsesnort1.wav
e3 - horsesnort2.wav
e3 - horsestomp.wav
e4 - appropriatemusic1.wav
e4 - appropriatemusic2.wav

So the program will play loop1 and 2 constantly, at a volume I select. It will then randomly play a wav from the effects 1 group (e1), and the effects 2 group (e2), etc. So what you end up with is a great multi-layered effect which really brings a setting to life.

What's great about this program is that you can download pre-created 'soundcapes' already (please donate first if you do at creator's request) which have a load of great sound effects. Things like town villages, storms, spooky woods, etc. So once you have them as a base you can easily modify them or layer them on top of your own musical selection.

[adminwheel3]

While working on my soundscape I decided I needed a few more bits and pieces to make it just right. I'm sure there are thousands of places where you can get free sounds, but I am a bit of a security bug so I tend to go to companies where they have a vested interest in not selling me software which is going to mess with my system.

I came across https://www.soundrangers.com which had just what I was looking for. A few horse snorts, some horses walking down a gravel path and the sounds of a crackling campfire and I was in business.

I also picked up Sound Forge Audio Studio (free for 30 days) at https://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/audiostudio

This allowed me to easily take multiple sound files and combine them into a single track. That way I could have my loop1 track be strictly wind while my loop2 could be a combination of insects and campfire sounds.

The last utility I grabbed was Total Recorder. https://www.highcriteria.com/
Their website isn't much to look at, but the product was (for me) invaluable. It allowed me to record without any loss of fidelity exactly what I was outputing to my speakers.

Now I know there are many people who don't need these because they have a functioning "what u hear" or Stereo Mix option - unfortunately I and many others don't. I think it may be a Windows 7 / Creative Labs thing to keep people from stealing music but whatever the cause no matter how much fiddling I did I couldn't get my system to record my sound output. Total Recorder fixed that for me in about 5 minutes - well worth the $17.95.

So now I'm all set up to create mixes, enhance them with additional effects, modify the sound files if needed and record them.

I should say the last step of recording isn't needed if you are playing to a live group - you can just queue up sounds on the fly using Syrinscape. But since I'm assuming most people reading this would be streaming their creations the easiest way would be to have already set up mp3 files of your soundscapes ready to go.

Hope someone finds this useful. It took me several hours to track down all the software I needed and get it all working, but in the end I'm pretty happy with the results. And now I'm prepped to make these soundscapes much more quickly.

Here is a small sample of what I worked up for a role playing scene which is going to take place high up some heavily forested mountains, around a campfire at night. Play it with the lights down low and with your eyes closed and tell me you can't picture yourself revealing character back-story. I dare you!

https://www.mediafire.com/file/nt15y...NightCamp1.mp3

[dm-crazy]

Excelent post!

[Zeus]

I just downloaded the trial version of Syrinscape to have a play. I can see it being quite popular with RPG fans who want to add some ambience to their games.

I like it but unfortunately can't use it as it doesn't offer the choice of which audio device to output to. As a result I can't route its output into my mixer for inclusion into my conference setup. Tis a shame. Regardless I made a contribution as I quite liked some of the soundsets that you can download from the website.

However for those of you who like me want to be able to route your sound output to specific devices but like the flexibility of Syrinscape-esque type setup then you should checkout Combiwave.

Its a different app but based on a similar feature capability i.e. play multiple sounds that you can cue independently, loop or trigger with other sounds. However whilst Syrinscape was designed with RPGers in mind Combiwave was designed for the Radio/Drama/Stage Production markets. Regardless the results are similar, great ambience for your RPG games.





Its supports a great number of different file formats including WAV, AIFF, OGG, WMA and MP3 and of course allows you to route each channel to a specific audio device. However my favorite feature is the ability to use Hotkeys which can be used to trigger each of a playlists channels e.g. a loop of a soft whistling wind, the lone cry of a mountain wolf, distant echoes of a wounded dragon etc. etc. The hotkeys work even when Combiwave is not in focus, so I typically set up some playlists before a game and use a thin cardboard keyboard guide that I lay over the keyboard to remind me which hotkey triggers which sounds, loops and effects. Then during a game with FGII its still quick to cue up and play whatever I need with little or no delay and more importantly no distracting technical mumbo-jumbo to shatter any immersion for the players.

Check it out, well worth the 30 odd euros.

[Astinus]

Thank you to adminwheel3 and DrZeuss for all the information. I guess Syrinscape would work with Virtual Audio Cable, but why opt for two programs if Combiwave fulfills both functions?

[Zeus]

Syrinscape won't work with VAC as you can't specify which audio device Syrinscape should output to? It's for this reason I suggested Combiwave over Syrinscape.

[adminwheel3]

I'm curious about this "I can't route its output into my mixer for inclusion into my conference setup."

Can you give more details on how your conference is set up? I'm still trying to figure out how to balance music with Ventrillo - having a channel for vent that does nothing but music is a poor solution at best as the quality is low.

Skype quality is better, but it doesn't support push to talk (that I can tell) and my players don't want to have an always-on mic. I might be able to convince them that they just need to mute the mics on their end physically (most have on-off switches), but that's just going to lead to less conversation and more missed messages as people forget that their mics are off.

[Zeus]

My setup is mainly for producing music but I have exploited the mixing desk hardware that I have so that I can 'merge' my mic output and and select desk outputs (one of which is for audio from the PC hosting FGII) so that I can input these to Skype as a single input.

Syrinscape uses the default Windows Sound Mapper device to output to the current Windows default output device (speakers or headphones etc.). So Syrinscape's output is merged with sounds from any other apps running on the same machine as well as Windows system sounds.

What you want is the ability to route the output from Syrinscape so that you can merge just Syrinscape and a Mic outputs and nothing else. Otherwise your players will also hear sounds from other apps and/or Windows itself. Undesirable.

Some users here are using Virtual Audio Cable to achieve the same effect. See this thread and post 11.

[EugeneZ]

I like it but unfortunately can't use it as it doesn't offer the choice of which audio device to output to.

It's for this reason I have a feature request on their forums to add this. The developer responded positively and said he'd look into it for the next version. Combiwave looks interesting, I'm definitely going to try it. Thanks.

[Uthred]

I just came upon this post, and thought I would add to it.

There is an excellent product designed especially for gaming called RPG Soundmixer; similar to Syrinscape, but much more flexible, although there is a bit of a learning curve. There is a demo version available: https://www.rpgsoundmixer.com/

Also, what I use, both online and at the gaming table, is a mixing board program called Mixere; it looks like it is similar to Combiwave, but Mixere is totally free: https://mixere.sourceforge.net/