Heroes 3 users please check something for me!

[Artas1984]

Download file called "StrongHold.mp3"

http://artas1984.b4net.lt/music/

Paste the music file in your Heroes 3 "MP3" folder (back up your original file) and then launch the game. Open StrongHold town and hear the new music - report if you hear any glitches! I can hear high pitch glitches while music is playing in the game! However i hear no such things if the song is played in a regular player.

I made this custom song from LOTR soundtrack by merging and cutting several tracks and made sure that the properties of the MP3 would exactly match the properties of the default songs in Heroes 3.

[GreatEmerald]

I can't check it right now, but make sure the file has no ID3 tags! You can check it (and remove if necessary) yourself by using the program MP3Tag on Windows.

[Artas1984]

People! Is it so hard to do what i have requested? Please be cooperative and help me out! Can anybody do this simple request and reply or do the forum members care only about themselves? Or perhaps nobody has Heroes 3 at the moment?

[Panda Tar]

Calm down. The latter may be true. Besides, give them time to return to the boards and check the topics. Not everyone will come and read this, nor they'll be available to test. We don't know what are the priorities of others in real life, so patience is always crucial on the boards.

I would have tested, but I'm one that couldn't find my Homm3 copy. GreatEmerald suggestion didn't work? What about the frequency levels? Are they above/below human hearing (high peaks and low peaks) in your composition? Perhaps the game crashes with the sound when that goes too high or too low. I don't have a sound editor software installed here at work at the moment, so I cannot check myself.

[Artas1984]

Salamandre said the tags are not the case...

And i sure made the sound files of the exact properties like the defaults..

Anyway it is interesting if other people hear the exact same glitches or a bit different way?

[Panda Tar]

Well, if it varies from one to another, the problem can be the whole file. But how can you know that the glitches are alike from what we can tell you? We can say when they happen, but hard to tell how they sound like.

Anyway, try getting that song without being edited, original and place in the Homm music directory to check if the problem is coming since then, or if it just happens after you edit it. That may help identify if the problem is while you're saving the file, compression issues, or else.

[Salamandre]

It is impossible to identify your problem without having access to Heroes program processing the mp3, but it is hardcoded and probably out of test. By the past, I modified several times all the mp3 (notably in Atlantis mod) and from the moment I had similar compressions to Heroes regular mp3, all worked fine. Even with not compatible files, I did not have the noises you report. When the file wasn't compatible, it did not play at all. Only one person, GrayFace, is able to find the answer to your problem, but he is gone from Heroes a long time ago.

[Pol]

Problem confirmed.

Your problem is lame. Thereof, likely absence of it

"D. Music:
No known problems. It's recommended to recode the music by lame codec, with same parameters like are having files in the game (mp3, cd quality, joint stereo, vbr, any size). All music in the game will be played mono, here's no way how to switch to stereo mode.
"

From my extremely old documentation accompanying "Forgotten Heroes" project. All still true, apart (& luckily) from last sentence.

[Artas1984]

The glitching is random: even unmoded sound files glitch, some simply do not sound at all, and some sound just fine.

Pol: i do use lame to export the files, but what difference does it make if even the original unmoded file makes those glitches? What are you suggesting?

By the way: the bitrate is variable in default MP3, i exported to constant - will check it out..

[Pol]

Compare, compare, compare.

>>

http://web.archive.org/web/200708072041 ... index.html

.. and then recode.

[Artas1984]

Check this out for instance

http://artas1984.b4net.lt/music/sample.mp3

It won't sound at all if played in a Heroes 3 town - i noticed that it does not matter the bitrate, does not matter if there are tags or no tags, some files just won't be played...

Where is the key in this?

[Artas1984]

Compare, compare, compare.

>>

http://web.archive.org/web/200708072041 ... index.html

.. and then recode.

What?

[Pol]

And old analyser. Perhaps it will come handy. Long life for web archive service. Once we will be all here, err, our snapshots. Preferably.

[Artas1984]

Ok, thank you all for cooperation. This can not be fixed. I have managed to reduce the noice by increasing the bitrate - sound file with higher bitrate sounds less irritating than the one with 128 kbps. I also checked and found out that it does not matter if the file is VBR or CBR, with tags or not - no mater...

I have managed to reduce the noise, though have not got rid of it completely.

[Panda Tar]

This is so odd. When I played H3, I inserted edited songs in there and everything was always neat. Final Fantasy IX tracks, Beethoven's (for Necropolis, if I recall), Wild Arm's, and some other stuff.

[Pol]

Usually it can be fixed Artas. May be I should write re-process instead of simple re-encode. But I was not successful every time as far as my memory goes (or went bored to).

Did you tried "Normalize"?

I was playing with it in GoldWave ages ago and created two H3 Sound Schemes. Neither or them, in final version, was having that problem.

But yes, I cut down some samples as unworthy to repair.