Ajusting ALL of the volume (muting the game)
Posted: February 18th, 2009, 5:25 pm
First off I'd like to say this is a great game. I purchased from Steam a few days ago. It is the kind of game I have spent YEARS searching for (ever since Oblivion proved itself "console-stupid")
Second I want to say that I actually like the sounds and music in the game, and the following is not an indictment of the game audio.
...but, as I am sure many of you already know, turning down all volume sliders in options will not actually mute the entire game. And as a frothing-at-the-mouth music aficionado, I can't go too long without a little Johnny Cash, or Joy Division, or Tom Waits, etc. etc. You get the idea.
I searched the forums but only found a post confirming the lack of a master volume. So I figured out a (mostly) simple method of muting the game. Luckily, all the sound files are WAVs, which are easily manipulated. First, make backups of the files you plan to alter. I did the entire Eschalon "sounds" directory. Then go download yourself an 'audio normalizer' program that handles WAVs and does batch processing. Run a batch process on said sound files and set the normalization to zero. Using the same method, you could also just lower the relative game volume, instead of setting it all the way down to zero.
And that is all, no more to it. You only have to do it once. Plus you can swap the backed up, non-normalized files if you do want to have the original sounds back. The game music is mutable in the options, so don't bother to alter it.
I was afraid Steam might detect the file as being altered and attempt to redownload them, but so far, no problems. Also, there should be no bugs created by this as the files are still existing, full size and effectively unaltered. Of course, there are never any guarantees with any hack, even one as simple as this.
Does anyone know of a more simple way to mute the game than this? I was hoping for a launch argument or something along those lines, but I found nothing in a search.
Second I want to say that I actually like the sounds and music in the game, and the following is not an indictment of the game audio.
...but, as I am sure many of you already know, turning down all volume sliders in options will not actually mute the entire game. And as a frothing-at-the-mouth music aficionado, I can't go too long without a little Johnny Cash, or Joy Division, or Tom Waits, etc. etc. You get the idea.
I searched the forums but only found a post confirming the lack of a master volume. So I figured out a (mostly) simple method of muting the game. Luckily, all the sound files are WAVs, which are easily manipulated. First, make backups of the files you plan to alter. I did the entire Eschalon "sounds" directory. Then go download yourself an 'audio normalizer' program that handles WAVs and does batch processing. Run a batch process on said sound files and set the normalization to zero. Using the same method, you could also just lower the relative game volume, instead of setting it all the way down to zero.
And that is all, no more to it. You only have to do it once. Plus you can swap the backed up, non-normalized files if you do want to have the original sounds back. The game music is mutable in the options, so don't bother to alter it.
I was afraid Steam might detect the file as being altered and attempt to redownload them, but so far, no problems. Also, there should be no bugs created by this as the files are still existing, full size and effectively unaltered. Of course, there are never any guarantees with any hack, even one as simple as this.
Does anyone know of a more simple way to mute the game than this? I was hoping for a launch argument or something along those lines, but I found nothing in a search.