Best way to equalise sound?

Support
#1

Hey folk,
We’ve been using Syrinscape for our DnD videos whilst in lockdown and the game was online. We’ve now moved back to the table, and I am struggling a little to get the different elements in soundsets to be roughly of the same volume.

I have created all custom soundsets with custom elements (all properly credited ofc :slight_smile: ), but when I change within soundset from e.g. element ‘exploring happy’ to element ‘exploring ominous’ I find that Kevin McLeod comes out of the speakers a lot louder than my previous mood did. It means I am constantly adjusting the volume bar of the player during the game, and it makes the sound editing of recordings a bit more challenging as well!
Is there any way to equalise the elements within a soundset that I may have missed?

It’s a minor inconvenience for what is otherwise a great app! But any tips or feedback would be welcome!

Cheers,
Marissa

#2

This is also my only significant complaint with the product.

#3

I also noticed different volume levels between some sound sets, which is not very nice, but it is manageable for now. Especially since online play I am tunneling via Kenku and virtual audio cable and for some reason I have to put all volumes to minimal or head will explode when the bot joins the Discord channel.

#4

Heya,

If you notice some SoundSets that are out of kilter with other content, definitely let me know, and I’ll take a look and adjust. :slight_smile:

#5

Hi, do you know about the Initial Volume under the SoundSet inspector? That’s visible in your OWN content or duplicates of Official stuff. With that you can apply an overall adjustment to everything, to make up the gap between adjacent content.

Note: at the moment there is a small bug, that sets this to 100% when you duplicate content. So something that might have had a GOOD offset when official will lose that upon duplication. Sense makes? :slight_smile:

#6

Can you be more specific, or give an example of something I can help with, or explain, or note to fix? :robot: :hammer:

#7

I’m sorry for the slow reply, @benjamin, I forgot I wanted to respond until I ran into this again now.

Choose pretty much any soundset. (I’m just now using the early ones from Curse of Strahd.) Put on an ambient preset like “travelling through the woods” or whatever. Put it at a comfortable volume so that everybody around the table can hear all those great subtle sounds of branches rustling, feet hitting the ground, birds chirping, whatever…

Now switch over to a preset that is a fight. Do the sudden loud stabs of music, and/or screams and growls, etc., not cause you to jump out of your seat? The fighting presets are generally WAY LOUDER.

On the surface, this makes perfect sense. Fights are probably louder than walking through the woods.

But, this isn’t real life, or even a movie where we want to perfectly imitate loud things being way louder. Mostly, I think, we want Syrinscape to provide a consistent level of volume that can be heard, but easily talked over. That means that, even if it is unrealistic, a “loud” fighting preset should be the same volume as a “quiet” atmospheric one.

(I hope I’m using the terms “soundset” and “preset” appropriately. If not, I hope context explains what I mean and what I’m trying to do.)

#8

Hi Brian,

The delay was useful because it has allowed us to do a LOT of work on the recent release without feeling like we’ve been ignoring you! :smiley:

I have just started to dive into the finally output route again… basically it is here with compression that we should be able to help you get the results you want = smoothing off some of those BIG lumps of loudness… I’m thinking about maybe even giving users the ability to set the level of compression they desire eg mild medium and STRONG (what you clearly are prefering).

Stay tuned there… though we have a fair few quite nasty bugs to squash first before we get to work to hard on that sort of stuff above.

in the meantime… I suppose be ready to tweak that master volume in anticipation of the big changes in volume you have become aware of…

AND/OR start making your own custom versions of the MOODs that are not mixed to your taste(?) = basically a uniform % change of ALL element volumes up or down will get you a change of total volume without changing the relative mix of things.

Have a go of that… AND make sure you keep advocating for what YOU see as important to you in the apps! :slight_smile:

Have you tried app.syrinscape.com (it does already have STRONGER compression as standard).

#9

Oh wow, thanks for the great reply!

Tweaking the master volume is what I’ve gotten used to, and it’s obviously not a showstopper issue, it’s just-- as I say-- my only real complaint. :slight_smile: Still a usable and useful product.

I’m definitely too lazy to make custom versions of everything! One of the things I like about Syrinscape is that I get great sound for published campaigns with very little effort, allowing me to focus my prep time elsewhere. (Be proud of this! It’s so useful!)

I have tried app.syrinscape.com but didn’t realize that it had different compression! I’ll have to play around with that more. Do you need to be SuperSyrin to use it?

Thanks again for the reply, and good luck with the bugs. Stability and reliability are definitely priorities!

#10

Hi Benjamin,

Really appreciate the responses. I’m afraid that I, too, am guilty of not checking forums enough. It’s really nice to see you guys picking this up though!
My specific issue is with custom moods. I’m a big fan of mixing different elements, already existing ones and imported ones. Not only is it quite hard at the moment to equalise these*, but I also find that when I switch between created moods (let’s say ‘sad’ vs. ‘dungeon scary’), I can’t easily stay in the narrative because I have to interrupt myself to manually adjust the volume.
If there was a way to set an over-all equaliser that would be so fab. Some sort of hard delimiter in a mood that can stop peaks at -24dcb would be amazing.
Like Brian said: definitely not a showstopper but it would be an amazingly useful feature. Especially for streaming, recording purposes!

*I know that you can use the sliders of the individual elements within the moods but I find these so difficult to use. That might be a user-problem though.

(Just clicked http://app.syrinsape.com/ to check it out , appears broken to me at the moment!)

Thanks again for the responses!

#11

Derp! I mistyped (now corrected in my post)… should have been: https://app.syrinscape.com/, obviously!

Other thoughts:
Do note the Initial Volume setting under the SoundSet inspector, that changes the volume of the WHOLE SoundSet relative to all other SoundSets. That might help.

Anyother solution might be a, “make every element louder by 10%” button that bumps up the volume of everything currently playing, and then you could SAVE CURRENT STATE. That might be a nice way of changing the volume of a MOOD, relative to every other MOOD in the same SoundSet.

Note: a limiter is not REALLY going to make a LOUD MOOD sound the same as a soft MOOD, as it will really only take off the PEAKS (depending on how deep it is set).

I will continue thinking. :slight_smile: