.WAV sounds are just white noise

So, I’m playing around with adding sound effects to projects since it’s not a thing I’ve done much of. I’m having an issue where some sounds I play are simply white noise. I downloaded some free RPG sounds from opengameart.org, and when I play the sounds in isolation from the folder they sound fine, but when I try to play them in Urho3D using a SoundSource, they’re just white noise. The sounds that come with Urho3D sound fine, but those are the only sounds that work well. I’ve tried numerous different .WAV files from 3 or 4 different archives on opengameart, but they all just sound the same.

Any ideas on what to look for as the cause of this?

All the samples in Urho3D samples asset dir are PCM encoded mono sound source.

[weitjong@igloo bin]$ find . -name \*.wav |xargs file
./Data/Sounds/PlayerLand.wav:     RIFF (little-endian) data, WAVE audio, Microsoft PCM, 16 bit, mono 44100 Hz
./Data/Sounds/PlayerFistHit.wav:  RIFF (little-endian) data, WAVE audio, Microsoft PCM, 16 bit, mono 44100 Hz
./Data/Sounds/BigExplosion.wav:   RIFF (little-endian) data, WAVE audio, Microsoft PCM, 16 bit, mono 44100 Hz
./Data/Sounds/SmallExplosion.wav: RIFF (little-endian) data, WAVE audio, Microsoft PCM, 16 bit, mono 44100 Hz
./Data/Sounds/Powerup.wav:        RIFF (little-endian) data, WAVE audio, Microsoft PCM, 16 bit, mono 44100 Hz
./Data/Sounds/NutThrow.wav:       RIFF (little-endian) data, WAVE audio, Microsoft PCM, 16 bit, mono 44100 Hz
./Data/Sounds/PlayerFist.wav:     RIFF (little-endian) data, WAVE audio, Microsoft PCM, 16 bit, mono 44100 Hz

You can’t play stereo sounds using 3D audio. If you want to use a 3D sound source and listener, you need to force your sounds to be mono.
I used this free website service to force my sounds to be mono:

Alright, looks like converting them to mono works. Thanks, guys.

You’re very welcome

It think it might have been the sample rate.

@Leith sudo apt-get install soundconverter?

Modanung, if you try to play a stereo sound in 3D, the fact that both channels exist in the audio stream is ignored, this causes a sound like white noise. We simply need to recognize the fact that in 3D audio, a sound is coming from a 3D source, so it does not need (and cannot be) stereo. I am not saying we can’t play stereo sounds, but I am saying we do that with a 2D listener and no sound source… effectively, we have two ears, but sounds are not naturally stereoscopic

It would be nice if the audio system in urho automatically could deal with mixing down stereo channels, for use in a 3D context… but it doesn’t.

It’s easier for me to use a drag and drop interface, than type stuff into my linux terminal
I am lazy - I respect the potential for batching, but I don’t tend to batch asset operations often.

SoundConverter has a GUI, the command can simply be copy pasted into a terminal to install it.

oh, it has a gui? I’ll take a look in that case

I have installed it, preferences look simple enough, and I save a few hundred kb of network band a month
I’m on a fixed cable connection, traffic shaping is engaged at 500 GB per month, I’ve never managed to touch the sides of it, but still cool, I didn’t know about this.

If I remember correctly I ran into a similar issue with a music track and had to change the sample rate in that case. There may be more then one way playing a sound can result in noise since what we’re hearing is basically scrambled data.

Could be, well I ran into the 3D sounds with stereo issue almost immediately, it seemed most likely