Sound and Music

This article or section needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality because:

This article and related articles about Sound are a mess.

For help, see the VDC Editing Help and Wikipedia cleanup process. Also, remember to check for any notes left by the tagger at this article's talk page.

Todo: There needs to be a brief description or link to a tutorial or guide on how to take an existing .wav file and make it accessible to the Hammer Sound Browser or Face Poser.

Sound in Source can be processed in many ways. It can emit from a location in the world, have its pitch or volume altered, trigger behaviours from NPCs, and be lip synced.

Entities

• ambient_generic — this is the basic entity to play a specific sound or soundscript, including music.
• ambient_music — audio in the music layer, overriding music queued by the AI Director.
• env_soundscape — for playing background noises and ambience. (see Soundscapes)
• env_soundscape_proxy Point entity that acts like a soundscape but gets all of its sound parameters from another env_soundscape entity.
• env_soundscape_triggerable Point entity just like env_soundscape except that it works in conjunction with the trigger_soundscape entity to determine when a player hears it.
• trigger_soundscape Brush-based soundscape trigger. Does not need outputs, as it automatically triggers the soundscape specified by its Soundscape property.
• env_microphone — detects sounds.
• env_speaker — plays sounds based on a set of Response System rules.
• scripted_sentence — used to make an NPC speak an idea.
• sound_mix_layer — used to set a mix layer to a specific value.
• logic_choreographed_scene — used for conversations and other sequences. See Category:Choreography.

Articles

• Category:Sound System — how sound works in Source.
• Soundscripts — advanced sound usage in Source.
• Sound In Code
• Hammer Sound Browser — documents the Hammer user interface for browsing sounds.
• Soundscapes — background sounds and ambience.
• Sound sensitive trigger — how to trigger an event based on the loudness.
• Startup Music — one way to add music to a mod's title screen (alternatively, put it in a Menu Background Map).

AI sounds

• AI sounds are not audible to the player; they are purely an AI construction. They can be placed in-map with the ai_sound entity.

Music

• Creating your own music — composing and adding music to a mod.
• Soundtrack lists — for using existing music already included in the base game

Materials

To specify the set of sounds for a custom material (the noises produced in response to hits, scrapes, etc), see Material surface properties.

Notes

• To play music, use Hammer Sound Browser to search for keyword music.
• Many entities can have sounds assigned to them. For example, prop_door_rotating can be assigned sounds for opening, closing, swinging, being locked, and being unlocked. See the individual entities for details.
• To make audio files affected by the music slider, add the # character before the file path when declaring (ex "#music/HL2_song20_submix0.mp3")
• Although Source supports surround sound, it cannot read audio files containing more than two channels. Surround effects should be either downmixed to stereo, implemented using soundscape targets or ambient_generic entities, or worked around using carefully placed scene actors.

See also

• Level Design
• Left 4 Dead Soundscripts

External links

• Custom sounds tutorial