Soundpacks

[Gryphe]

This is either a silly or an intelligent question and concerns customizing the sounds of the default personality.

You see, I'm mostly interested in changing the sounds of my Pleo, Woof. I'm sure that you can tell by his name what kind of sounds I'm talking about. ;)

What would be the best way to do this, considering the tools we currently have available to us?

[pleoWhisperer]

a "soundpack" as you call it would be the simplest way. All you need to do is create the sounds you want. The sounds need to be in an uncompressed PCM (.wav file) 8-bit sample at an 11K sampling rate. Once created, the sounds need to be saved as individual files named to match the sounds they are replacing. These files are then copied onto an SD card and inserted into pleo. The LifeOS automatically looks at the card first for a sound file. If the file is on the card, it plays the sound from the card. If the sound file is not on the card, it uses the file stored internally.

[PleoPet]

re: customizing the sounds of the default personality.
The shadowing feature is useful for replacing a few of the regular sounds. You have to name the sounds properly. You can use YAPT and P3D to browse through the existing sounds.
http://www.aibohack.com/pleo/yapt2.htm (under "Browsing PleoPM (the default personality)")

In general, you should try to make the new sound the same length/time as the original.
If you are planning on replacing many (hundreds) of the 396 sounds, then you should extract the old sounds, edit them and repackage them into a PLEO.URF. The original sounds are 11KHz, 4 bit (ADPCM) samples. PleoSkit/MySkit reads and writes the proprietary USF format.
Several people have asked for this. Ideally UGOBE would release the sounds in a higher quality WAV format that can be algorithmically modified (eg: more elaborate pitch shift to make the Pleo sound more female)

[Porturtle]

Hello all,

I am excited to be able to program Pleo to do different things.

While working with MySkit, I got some short sound bits done.

However the sounds are a little quiet, any suggestions on how to make his sounds a little louder?

Also, is there somewhere out on the web that people know about that has sounds in a format we can use for Pleo? Like a wav library of sorts? I found a few for movie quotes, but if anyone knows a great one they would like to share that would be awesome.

Thats about it for sound stuff!

Porturtle

[mweed]

Audacity is a good basic audio tool you can get for free that you can use to manipulate the sound files (cut/trim, re-sample, adjust pitch, adjust loudness, etc).

[Gryphe]

re: customizing the sounds of the default personality.
The shadowing feature is useful for replacing a few of the regular sounds. You have to name the sounds properly. You can use YAPT and P3D to browse through the existing sounds.
http://www.aibohack.com/pleo/yapt2.htm (under "Browsing PleoPM (the default personality)")

In general, you should try to make the new sound the same length/time as the original.
If you are planning on replacing many (hundreds) of the 396 sounds, then you should extract the old sounds, edit them and repackage them into a PLEO.URF. The original sounds are 11KHz, 4 bit (ADPCM) samples. PleoSkit/MySkit reads and writes the proprietary USF format.
Several people have asked for this. Ideally UGOBE would release the sounds in a higher quality WAV format that can be algorithmically modified (eg: more elaborate pitch shift to make the Pleo sound more female)

Do you have any idea how to extract the sounds from the PLEO.URF file? Because I certainly don't.

[Gryphe]

A quick update. I grabbed some software of mine to record the sounds played through P3D. They're exact duplicates of the original Pleo sounds and will make a very good base to start working with.

UGOBE, would it be okay for me to publish these sound files?

[PleoPet]

> ...any suggestions on how to make his sounds a little louder?
Using MySkit, there are options under the "Sound"/"Wave File Effects" menu, you can raise the volume, or use "Normalize Wave" (recommended). Other sound/WAV editors have similar features.

> is there somewhere out on the web that people know about that has sounds in a format we can use for Pleo? Like a wav library of sorts?
You can convert most files to the proper Pleo compatible format (MySkit will do this for you)
There is no one place on the web (for copyright and other reasons). Search around for what you are interested in. Number of clips and audio quality may vary.
If from a movie or a TV show, you can rip the audio from a DVD (excellent quality, but voice may be mixed with background music)

> Do you have any idea how to extract the sounds from the PLEO.URF file?
I have a simple utility that does it. Email me if interested.