Simon the Sorcerer - Some audio not playing.

CaptainHair57 · Post by **CaptainHair57** » Sat Mar 19, 2011 5:00 pm

Amazing job with the program, having great fun playing my old games again. Just have a slight issue with Simon the Sorcerer.

For some reason it can't play all of the game audio, early on both music and speech works, but a little bit into the game the console gives out errors and the audio for speech stops working. I'm using the latest scummVM release and have a .wav file for my audio (SIMON.wav). I belive I encoded this correctly back when i had windows XP. However in windows7 CDex gives me a million errors and crashs. Audacity doesnt like opening simon.wav either. So I'm in a bit of a pickle.

If most of the audio works, the .wav file should be correct, otherwise no audio would play, I think?

I had been using an older version of scumm and it was saying "failed to open ... track22.wav" and such things. With the latest version of Scumm I'm getting "Failed to open mp:/scummvm-1.2.1-ds/games/simon the sorcerer 1 (CD windows)/!" which has me kind of confused.

Its almost certainly user-error on my part, but I'd appriciate it if anyone could give me some advice. Thanks

Post by **eriktorbjorn** » Sat Mar 19, 2011 5:33 pm

CaptainHair57 wrote: If most of the audio works, the .wav file should be correct, otherwise no audio would play, I think?

Not necessarily. Anyway, from what I remember that file is actually a large number of smaller files that have been concatenated together. (Possibly with some kind of index at the beginning.) So if some sounds are not played, one possibility would be that the file is truncated, i.e. cut off prematurely.

CaptainHair57 · Post by **CaptainHair57** » Sat Mar 19, 2011 5:43 pm

Ah, ok, that sounds like the exact problem. I'm downloading a beta of audacity now to see if it'll open the simon.wav file. Hopefully just a re-encode will fix it. I'll report back when its finished downloading (2.7kB/s!) Cheers

EDIT: Bleh, Audacity says "Audacity recognized the type of the file 'SIMON.wav' but none of the importers understood this file format"

I can see I'm going to have to search out my CD from way-back when. Bummer.

Post by **eriktorbjorn** » Sat Mar 19, 2011 6:42 pm

CaptainHair57 wrote: EDIT: Bleh, Audacity says "Audacity recognized the type of the file 'SIMON.wav' but none of the importers understood this file format"

There are ScummVM-specific tools for compressing the audio file, but that should be optional and would not be of any help in repairing a damaged file anyway.

CaptainHair57 · Post by **CaptainHair57** » Sat Mar 19, 2011 7:07 pm

I managed to get audacity to import it as raw audio, but the exported file crashed scumm. Audacity seems quite limited on setting when exporting wavs.

I've been trying to use the specific tools, but it only allows for mp3/flac/vorbis. The only one that actually works on DS to my knowlege is mp3 and wav, mp3 being warned as jittery.

Still jittery is better than no audio, i'll give it a shot. EDIT: Nevermind, Decrunch error! Back to searching for my CD I guess, I think the audio file is simply damaged.

Post by **eriktorbjorn** » Sat Mar 19, 2011 8:49 pm

CaptainHair57 wrote:I managed to get audacity to import it as raw audio, but the exported file crashed scumm. Audacity seems quite limited on setting when exporting wavs.

I still don't understand at all what you're attempting to do with Audacity. As I tried to say before (but apparently wasn't clear about), the file isn't really a WAV file as it is usually understood. It's just named as if it was. I looked a bit closer at the part of ScummVM that loads it, and as far as I can tell it consists of an index (which tells where in the file each individual sound starts), followed by a bunch of individual WAV sound files.

If you tried to import the file as a raw audio file and then re-wrote it as a WAV file, you'd almost certainly put a WAV file header where ScummVM expects to find that index. I'd almost be surprised if it didn't crash. Either when reading the index or when trying to interpret the data at the incorrect offsets as valid sound files.

CaptainHair57 · Post by **CaptainHair57** » Sun Mar 20, 2011 12:26 am

Ah, ok. My mistake there then, from the FAQ I thought I could re-encode it in Audacity. I think I misread it.

I did try the scummvm tools to see about encoding the audio, but the decrunch error makes me think there is infact an error with my audio file itself and I'll need to take a new copy from the original CD.

Honestly I was just kinda hoping something magical would happen, my file would be fixed and I could hear chris barrie again. Obviously thats not going to happen, I do appriciate your help though. I'm just gonna have to keep searching for the disc.

EDIT: Just letting you know, re-ripping it from the CD solved it. Thanks very much for your help and patience

Simon the Sorcerer - Some audio not playing.

Simon the Sorcerer - Some audio not playing.

Re: Simon the Sorcerer - Some audio not playing.