Hi everyone,

As you might have seen from the other posts, I intended to push out an update last year (plus/minus a few days). Being the half intelligent person you are, you probably already figured out that the update didn't come to light.

Some people have noticed that some of the sounds don't work or are "glitchy" in one way or another. I've been meaning to address this problem but didn't really have the time to address it.

Now, I've received some less than polite comments about how easy some audio file replacements should have been. Hopefully I can explain why some of the sounds don't work, may have issues, and why it's not a case of drag and drop.

To begin, Mass Effect 2 stores its audio files within a proprietary archive format. This is perfectly normal for Unreal Engine games to do. You can see these files with the extensions of ".pcc" and ".afc". Such an example would be "Wwise_Garrus_Acq_Streaming.afc".

You can't open these files as a normal archive (such as a ".zip" or ".7z"), so you have to rely on someone else to write software to interpret the file format. A person by the name of Gibbed wrote a lot of interesting pieces for Mass Effect 2. The most common of these is the save game editor. For the audio, I had to use the ww2ogg program which someone by the name of hcs wrote, and Gibbed expanded upon.

So great, you have the audio files in an ".ogg" format. You are done right? Well, not quite. Ogg Vorbis is quote, "A completely open, patent-free, professional audio encoding and streaming technology with all the benefits of Open Source." The source engine (for some reason) can't understand the open source format. You have to pass the files through a converter to get them into something the source engine will understand.

The only options you have for this are wave (.wav) and MP3 (.mp3). To do a complete conversion, the voice files are in the wave format.

As some of you discovered, a simple pass through with a program (in this case the very powerful FFMPEG) doesn't really cut it. There's a lot to sound files, such as sample rate, if that rate is constant or not, bit depth, and so on. To further add to this problem, no one is really 100% sure on the exact specifications for sound files in the Source Engine.

After doing some investigations recently, it would appear that the sample rate on the mod's files is slightly too high for Source to handle them correctly.

In theory, this is what is causing the problems for a few of you. Strangely, I used the same process for both audio mods, and this one seems to have a lot more problems than the other.

Long story short, I should be pushing this much awaited update by the weekend.

For those interested, I used MediaInfo v0.7.80 to make the difference much more evident than in FFMPEG:

General
Complete name : A:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\SteamApps\common\Left 4 Dead 2\left4dead2\sound\player\survivor\voice\gambler\friendlyfire01.wav
Format : Wave
File size : 118 KiB
Duration : 2s 718ms
Overall bit rate mode : Constant
Overall bit rate : 356 Kbps
Encoded by : Bill Van Buren
Recorded date : 2009-05-19
Writing application : Sony Sound Forge 9.0

Audio
Format : PCM
Format settings, Endianness : Little
Format settings, Sign : Signed
Codec ID : 1
Duration : 2s 718ms
Bit rate mode : Constant
Bit rate : 352.8 Kbps
Channel(s) : 1 channel
Sampling rate : 22.05 KHz
Bit depth : 16 bits
Stream size : 117 KiB (99%)


General
Complete name : C:\Users\DarK_St3alth\Desktop\garrus\sound\player\survivor\voice\mechanic\friendlyfire01.wav
Format : Wave
File size : 30.8 KiB
Duration : 656ms
Overall bit rate mode : Constant
Overall bit rate : 385 Kbps

Audio
Format : PCM
Format settings, Endianness : Little
Format settings, Sign : Signed
Codec ID : 1
Duration : 656ms
Bit rate mode : Constant
Bit rate : 384 Kbps
Channel(s) : 1 channel
Sampling rate : 24.0 KHz
Bit depth : 16 bits
Stream size : 30.8 KiB (100%)