Hi. I have a computer game with sound effects and I want to use those effects for my RPG. Does anyone know of any recording programs capable of doing this? I don't want to hold the microphone up to the speakers and record that way because the quality will be sh*t.

I tried looking within the games folder and couldn't find the individual sound effect files, I'm guessing their all compacted into one big file, so I think recording is the only option.

Thanks in advance,
Pinky.

Use Audacity to record music/sound effects, though looking in the game folder also works (but you said you've tried that). It's what I use for all my sound/music related issues. Once you've downloaded it, open it up, and on the far right, there is a drop down box that dictates how the sound is recorded. I think you need to use "Stereo Mix", and then press Record, and then play your music/sounds, and edit as you see fit.
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

Ah OK, I have Audacity but I never knew you could use it like that. I'll do that now and report back!

EDIT: Ok I'm having trouble finding this drop down box, whats it called exactly?

DOUBLE EDIT: Ok I got it working but it's quieter on Audacity then it is on my headphones any reason why that would be so?

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Feb 8 2010, 6:17 am by Pinky.

There is an slider bar, directly left of the drop down box. Increase that (move it to the right) to increase the volume at which Audacity records. The other slider bar also controls how loud the sound is.

Depending on the game you can probably pull them out of the game itself, so you don't get any transfer distortions, try looking around inside the game's program files or searching online for the sound files of it. Sometimes they store them in files you can easily decompress, like zips.

Ok thanks I got it all working now just an additional question: looping music. Does Audacity have some way to do it easily? Or does it involve laborious editing work?

You're going to have to manually edit the music yourself. If you're lazy, you can just fade in the beginning, and fade out the end, it's not as nice sounding, but it's workable.

hold down shift and press the play button to loop a section.

Also, games typically store their data in a specific format to the game. Google the game. Most of the time, there's editors which can open up the data. SC's sounds are in the mpq, so you have to extract the mpq via winmpq. Baldur's gate sounds are in the data-cd files, and in acm format, so you have to download a converter to put them into wav. Fable's sound files are stored in an archive, so you have to download an editor to extract them.