I've spent the last week or so improving my Audacity skills and remembering several I forgot since I last used the program a few years ago. My goal was to come up with more realistic whistle sounds than what is available. I'm kind of partial to the East Broad Top and have good recordings of the whistles of 14 and 15. I also located a Youtube video that had the whistles all of the EBT 3ft locomotives. Another YouTube video provided bell sounds that are a lot less "dry" than what is available from Ring.
To grab the audio from the YouTube videos I used the freeware
4K Youtube to MP3 program I downloaded to my PC. The resulting MP3 file was imported into Audacity. The EBT whistle recordings were mostly crossing signals. All pretty nicely recorded.
My first task was to grab the crossing signal from just one locomotive. I started with EBT #12. Once I had 12's crossing signal blow nicely cleaned up, I exported it to a .WAV file for import into RailPro using the RPA program.
Next, I separated out just one blast from the crossing signal. I was mildly successful at creating a looped whistle sound. It has a little glitch where the loop repeats, but I might never use it. Why? Because from that single blast I created a Stop (1), Forward (2) and Reverse (3) signal. These were exported as individual .WAV files and imported via RPA.
On my HC, I have 5 buttons dedicated to whistle sounds; The Loop, Crossing Signal, Stop, Forward and Reverse each have a button.
I have completed one locomotive so far. The most challenging part has been how long it takes to export/import/copy and copy again in order to audition. Wouldn't it be awesome if Ring provided an audition capability for sounds in the RPA?
I need to get better at creating the looped sound. Even though I was successful with #12, I am having a hard time with #14. My sections play normally with an audio player on my PC, but once imported and installed on an LM they are just plain weird!
I welcome any pointers on creating looping sounds. I understand how the HC plays them back depending on how long you hold the button. Finding ideal lengths for each section is the tricky part. I was quite successful with the bell sound, but it is a lot simpler with the pauses between strikes.
So for now, I'll focus on my successes. This very short Youtube video is a demonstration of a few of the results so far...
