Messages

Next beta:
http://ueberlicht.googlepages.com/AGS.Plugin.AudioManager0.7beta.zip

The main features are complete, except for batch conversion...

The new release fixes a bug in the waveform generation for mp3 and ogg files.
The speech animation preview now looks like AGS 'character view(centre pivot)' preview.

@AGD2:
'Assign to character' now works as you suggested if there isn't already a file with that number. The new beta has a combobox above the animation preview that allows you to change the character. And thanks for finding those phonemes.

[same]

It seems that somewhere in the process of converting it to a .wav and then adding phonemes, it barely places any phonemes along the waveform.  Yet, if I place a .wav file of exactly the same speech file in the directory, right-click it, and choose "Create .pam file", then it will add many more phonemes across the entire length of the waveform, all of them being much more accurate.  This is the case with both male and female speech.

From the testing I've done, it looks like the resulting .pam file is even different (amount and type of phonemes and accuracy) each time if you're using the same source file. The conversion from mp3/ogg to wav is lossless, so that shouldn't be the problem. What bitrate are you using for the mp3s/oggs? Do you get better results if you encode the original waves in an higher quality?

Perhaps this should be reflected in the plugin. Either just by not accepting mp3s for .pam conversion (and explaining why), or maybe asking if the plugin should convert the file to .ogg. Is the full .ogg codec already in there or just the decoder?

I think I'll include a warning message for mp3s. Conversion will probably be in a future version (using lame and oggenc).

1) When watching the .pam preview in the audio editor, my dialogue pictures are drawn half outside the right-most edge of the box and there's no way to view the full dialogue picture. Having the ability to make the .pam preview pane at full-screen mode and auto adjust to fit in the width and height of any given Sierra-Style dialogue portrait would help.

Yeah, at the moment all sprites are stretched vertically to fit the preview pane height (maintaing the aspect ratio), but that will definitly be different in the next release.

2) I second GarageGothic on the request for some type of audio playback feature like Pamela has. For example, when clicking on a particular phoneme, it could play the audio segment between the phoneme you clicked and the next one, as Pamela does.

Will be in the next beta...

3) When you generate a .pam file from an .ogg or .mp3, and then look at the 'preferences' section of the .pam file, the path will list the file as an .ogg or .mp3.  However, Pamela can only open .wav files, so if you try to open this AGS-generated .pam file in Pamela it will give an 'incorrect path' error and refuse to open.  I guess auto-generated .pam files should always have the filename pointing to .wav in the path so that the backwards compatibility with Pamela still works.

Hmm, that's strange. I don't have any problems opening the pam files with Pamela. Even playback seems to work with mp3s, only oggs are messed up.

4) The auto-lipsyncing seems to work quite well with male voices and I only had to tweak a few phonemes. However, female voices (or voices with echo) seem to give very inaccurate results.  Doesn't the Annosoft SDK allow you to specify whether it's a male or female voice file you're syncing, prior to doing the auto-generation of the phonemes?  Any chance of including that feature?

That's currently not possible with Annosoft. Female voices could be recognized better if you add a new profile in Control Panel->Speech and let a woman train it (then you have to switch the profiles manually for male/female voices). Echoed voices may be possible if I add some cleaning stuff after the recognizion. I haven't test it yet and I'm not very optimistic about it.

Any idea why this could be?

Do you see any difference when you edit & save the pam file?

(there's a seemingly endless row of "Object reference not set to an instance of an object" messages if you forget to assign it to a character, but I guess that's covered in your missing stuff list). I did find one smalle issue that you didn't mention, which is that the previous frame isn't cleared so that each new frame is drawn on top of the previous ones.

Thanks. Will be fixed in the next version.

Suggestion: Would it be possible to have an audio preview as you move the phonemes around (playback of the few milliseconds following the phoneme timing)?

Yeah, I definitely want to add something like that. Should be possible without conversion. I have to look into it.

Okay, the first beta is ready:
http://ueberlicht.googlepages.com/AGS.Plugin.AudioManager0.7beta.zip

Speech files have now two new context menu entries:
"Create .pam file"
-mp3s and oggs are temporaly converted to wavs
-existing .pam files will be overridden/deleted

"Edit .pam file" (if the file exists...d'oh)
-left-click selects/places a phoneme
-right-click deselects it
-middle-click deletes it (alternatively via toolbar button)
-new phonemes can be added by selected the type in the listbox and left-clicking the waveform
-the type of the phoneme can be changed by selecting it and choosing the new type from the listbox
-you can replace a existing phoneme by placing a new or selected one on it
-by default selected/new phonemes follow the mouse cursor when you hover over the waveform. This can be turned off with the second toolbar button.

There's still some stuff missing:
-text-based lipsync is currently not included
-warning messages for the things you probably don't want to do...
-undo editing
-reload .pam file
-auto-convert phonemes
-multi-select phonemes
-batch creating .pam files
-automatic waveform zoom
-renaming the .pam file if you rename the speech file
-...

Known issue:
-slightly different Pamela phoneme positions if you save the file caused by rounding errors

Wouldn't it make more sense to keep the original source format (with all phonemes), and do any customization in AGS' lipsync setup (just add AA0 to the same frame as AY0 if using your example)?

Well, the plugin can change the lipsync characters, but the changes will only be reflected in the lipsync tab if you save and reload the game.

If I may make a suggestion about the implementation of this:

The controls are currently a bit different but i think future versions will allow some degree of customization.

Will the tool also allow a user to type their text in manually if they wish, rather than grabbing it automatically from the game script/dialog?

Yes

Or would it also allow you to move phonemes around at will and change them to other values like Pamela's editor?

Yes. Wouldn't be much of an editor if you couldn't do that . The layout will be similar to Pamela.

Thanks for the list. I've thought about letting the user add automatical converting rules, e.g. AY0 always becomes AA0 etc (After Annosoft->Pamela conversion).  But you will always be able to change the value manually.

It seems a bit ambitious for a plugin to try to retrieve the lipsynced text strings from AGS's dialog and script files

Since the plugin can already find the usage of audio files in scripts, it should be easy to get the text...if it's already in the script/dialog.

Do you plan to add .ogg and .mp3 support?

Yes. Probably by converting them back to wav...

At the moment it doesn't work when loading the generated .pam files into Pamela, on account of some of the letters being lowercase and others not having a number after them.

And I didn't include the "Preferences" section in the .pam file.


I definitely want to add an editor for .pam files which also shows a preview of the speech animation.

I've made a test editor plugin that converts the output of the Annosoft program to Pamela's format:
http://ueberlicht.googlepages.com/AGS.Plugin.generatepam.dll
(only wav files atm; sapi_lipsync.exe has to be in the editor folder)

I think I'll add that to the audio manager plugin...

If you have a seperate folder on your harddrive with all your audio files (with more descriptive names than 'music1.ogg') you want to use in your game, you can set this folder as the library.

Lists & filters should help you organize your files. Lists are pretty much the same as playlists in normal music players, so you have to add and remove entries manually. Filters are 'automatic lists', so e.g. you want a pane that only shows the files which descriptions contain the word 'Background', you can set this as a filter rule (right click on the filter node->edit filter).

Another release, another audio library. This time it's FMOD Ex.

Big new feature:
You can now add new subnodes to the Audio node. These nodes come in three flavours: Lists, Filters and Folders. Files have to be added manually to lists (-> file context menu), filters get them automatically if they match the conditions (-> filter context menu).

You can use StartFromNode(this, PARENTNODEID) to set the parent for new nodes.

My fault...should now be working again...

Fixed in the new version.

Thanks for reporting.

Nice work! Clever stuff getting the zoom to script thing to work, I don't think I actually exposed that on the interface!

The editor itself exposes the method "GUIController.ZoomToFile". But I was surprised that it really worked...

1. If you scroll down the list of sounds and select one, then switch to another tab and switch back, the list scrolls back to the top

Will be fixed in the next release.

2. I got this when previewing a sound:

Hmm, the only thing I'm doing there is a conversion from uint to int, so is the sound over 596 hours long?
Can you please upload the file, because I can't reproduce that.

*bump*
New version 0.5 with two major new features:

-Search for usage of file in script and dialog

-Audio files can now be given a script name which is declared as an enum. So in the script you can use it like that: "PlaySound(sndBoom)". (Thanks to RickJ for the suggestion.)

There's an unpacker for Inno Setup:
http://innounp.sf.net/test020.rar

Usage:
innounp -x AGS-3.0.0-RC4.exe

The files are extracted into two folders ({app}->AGS and {commonappdata}->demo game) in the current directory.

* Editor plugin API: Added ability to add script headers (eg. for enums, #defines) to compiler; and ability to get the list of script headers to access autocomplete data

Thanks a lot!

I'm working on adding the possibility for the user to refer to the audio files in the script by a name instead of a number. The plugin currently adds a new script whose header contains an enum declaration. But to make the enums effect all the user's scripts this header has to be the topmost.

So it would be nice if there's a way to make it stay at the top when the user adds a new script or changes the order.

BUG: EGO0.wav can't be called in the dialog editor. If used &0 the game will crash when it loads that sound file. AGS thinks its an invalid number.

Oops, my fault. Thanks for reporting. The lowest number for speech files is 1 not 0. This will be fixed in the next release.

I'm not sure what happened here as soon as I installed the latest sound manager it shifted the order of all my voice files around.

The files are no longer sorted alphabetically (DOS-Style).
e.g.:
speech1.mp3
speech10.mp3
speech2.mp3
speech20.mp3

They are sorted by their number (logical/Windows Explorer-Style)
e.g.:
speech1.mp3
speech2.mp3
speech10.mp3
speech20.mp3

Hmm, strange. That didn't happen with any of my files...
Looks like it plays them too fast (100x and 1000x faster).

Encoding them again with Audacity and Lame seems to fix that.
Alternatively you can replace the plugin with this version:
http://ueberlicht.googlepages.com/AGS.Plugin.AudioManager.dll
and delete ikpMP3.dll. So the plugin uses MCI again for mp3 files.

try this:

Code: ags

MenuCommand mc = _editor.GUIController.CreateMenuCommand(evArgs.Component, CONTROL_ID_CONTEXT_MENU_OPTION, "Simple edit");
evArgs.MenuCommands.Commands.Add(mc);