That depends on a lot of things. Are you using mp3 or wav files for the sounds? Also the audio should generally be 44100 Hz for it to work in-game.

They work when I manually put them in the files, but when I upload them as a addon it doesn't work, they're wav and have the correct sample rate

Do you have any other mod that might be overwriting them? Try moving your mod to the top of your load order to see if that fixes it.

I tried that. got rid of all of my addons and only had mine. didn't work :C. is there like some code I have to put there or do I just upload the sounds

No they should just work as normally. What does the file format look like?

just raw files. do I need to pack them? and if I do, do I pack every file or just the ones that I changed

It needs to look something like;

[Your weapon sound mod here]/sounds/weapons

Then you upload whatever you named the first file with everything in it with your sounds in the weapon folder

let me try. ty :X

I tried it, didn't work, packed it as a vpk and didn't work. is there something else I need to do?

You don't need to pack the files into a vpk. At this point I don't know how to help you with this as it seems there's just something wrong with the files themselves.