Slowly played sound files in Italian routes

[Hannes44]

Many Italian routes have nice station announcements, which worked well once with MSTS. In OR they are obviously played with maybe half speed or less. Can I change this somehow?

[ebnertra000]

Playing stereo sound files when it wants mono or vice versa might do that. Also sounds at the wrong bit rate (not 11KHz or whatever's specified in the .sms file could do it. In either case, you'd have to check the sound file in the route's SOUND folder to know for sure

[Hannes44]

Further investigation showed, that the sound files are from the "INVISOCAR": I had a look at the sms files, they call for stereo wav files. The wav files are mono and 22.05kH. How could that ever have worked in MSTS?

[ebnertra000]

I'm not sure, unless there's a frequency curve that MSTS recognized, but OR isn't. I suppose it could happen, but I really don't know

[EricF]

When MSTS encounters something that's out-of-bounds in any way, it tends to either assume whatever the "normal" parameters are and go with it, or just out-and-out ignore the error. If nothing crashes, MSTS goes on like nothing happened. Open Rails is strict in how it handles input parameters. On sounds, this means that OR will generally play the sound according to it's real format or settings -- so incorrectly formatted sound files or .sms file statements may cause it to play sounds "wrong" to our ears but "right" by program logic.

But...

There have been some improvements in the experimental/"unstable" release versions which have dealt with sound handling. This has made sounds in some situations which were playing incorrectly in OR play correctly now.

While it might not help for this particular situation, if you haven't already, try running the route in a recent experimental version. If the sound is correct, then it may be an edge case situation which has been fixed in the recent OR code. If not, you may need to inspect the sound file's properties as well as the .sms file(s) that call it and fix the issue. There can be an problems with either .sms files or with the sample rate and format of a sound file.

[Hannes44]

Thanks for your reply. I always use the latest experimental versions, so obviously there is no fix for this situation. But I edited the sms files and deleted the "stereo" line and I edited the wav files and reduced the sample rate to 11kH. It is a lot of tedious work for a small effect but now everything sounds ok.