Playing .wav samples and noise distortion

[g0blin]

Hello guys,

it's me again.

Since we are driving to the finish of "Middle City", we are remastering new (and better) sound effects for our game.
The main coding is usually made on a Windows laptop so I didn't immediatly realize that I had a problem with those new sounds.

This new batch of wav files has been prepared using "Logic 10" on a MacOS system, the sounds are sampled at 24bit rate, uncompressed.
While everything else works fine (included the mp3 music tracs), the sound fx are terribly distorted.

I'm using Hollywood 6, so I (wrongly?) assumed that the sample rate was not a problem anymore. "Avcodec.plugin" is installed.

This problem is only present on AmigaOS systems, while game is running nicely on MorphOS (and, of course, Win and Mac as well).

Should I resample those wav lowering the bit rate to 16?

Thanks
Gianluca

[airsoftsoftwair]

Sounds sampled at a resolution of 24-bit aren't supported by Hollywood at all. Hollywood's sound driver can only handle 8 or 16 bit resolutions. But as you said that it is working on some platforms, one of the following things is probably happening:

1) A datatype is downsampling the PCM data automatically to 16-bit; maybe MorphOS' datatypes can do this but OS4's datatypes can't do it so this would explain why it's working on MorphOS but not on OS4
2) avcodec.hwp is downsampling the PCM data automatically to 16-bit but then it should work on OS4, too

If you want me to take a look at this, please upload a test sound file somewhere and I'll check what's going on there.

[g0blin]

Ok, I'll send a couple of samples via e-mail right away.

[airsoftsoftwair]

Thanks, these *.wav files use an extended header format which Hollywood didn't recognize. However, they're not 24-bit samples but 16-bit ones. They worked on Windows because of DirectShow and on MorphOS because of datatypes. On OS4 the datatypes seem to be buggy as it's working in MultiView but not with Hollywood so you might want to report this to the OS4 team.

I've also added support to Hollywood for this extended header format so Hollywood will be able to load this format in the next version without the need for datatypes, but still you should report this to the OS4 developers.

[g0blin]

Thanks Andreas,

I'll report this matter to the OS4 team and I'll rework on the samples to make them usable by the current version on Hollywood.

Have a nice day
Gianluca

[g0blin]

Andreas,

I posted the problem on Hyperion forums to call for their help and I sent the files to the dev team.

I'll keep you posted.

[airsoftsoftwair]

Fixed now in Hollywood because OS4's sound.datatype doesn't seem to support V41 enhancements by Stephan Rupprecht.