Stream music over Ventrillo/Ingame (Without 3rd party progams)

[OblivionMage]

This is not a repost, and I didn't write it. I copied it from here: How to stream music over Ventrillo/Ingame chat after I found it on Digg, and just thought that it was useful. The parts not relating to WoW have been edited out.

There is already a guide on ventrillo streaming, but it requires payed 3rd party programs, this is how to do it with settings.

Here are some facts about streaming music over mics / through hlss:

• It does not lag the game for other people. If someone is QQ'ing over it lagging the game, they are misinformed.
• The quality is never going to be as good as it is out of your headphones (unless they really suck).

Alright, so here is the very short guide;

Over Ventrillo / Teamspeak:

Note that every computer is different, and just like those annoying background noises in headphones whenever you move mouses, there is a ridiculous amount of variables and factors involved. So much so that every person who wants to do this will have to tweak their settings / setup in order to maximize the quality.


This is what your settings should be:

1) Uncheck Push to talk
2) Silence time 0.5
3) Sensitivity 1
4) On the right for "Line", if you own a Creative card it'll be "What U Hear" otherwise set it to "Stereo Mix"
5) Check Mute Sound at the bottom or people will hear themselves talk. This is why the 1337 Radio channel is in queue mode where only one person is allowed to talk at a time.
6) Turn Winamp/WMP/whatever to 1/2 volume or it'll blare and be distorted.
Note that your outbound might need to be set negative a bit. My Audigy 2 ZS needs to be set to -4.


Always remember that all people might not like that youtube emo / deathmetal music that you love and adore, and that some find it VERY ANNOYING. Do not stream music in excess, and do not piss people off. If someone tells you to turn it off, it shouldn't have been on in the first place. That being said, I find that a little music before a raid if your playing WoW, or whatever can be interesting and motivational (And playing a remixed 'Alright, two thumbs up lets do this LER...' can be quite fun before actually doing it in your SW raids ^.^)


((The part about HLSS streaming has been removed, as it has nothing to do with WoW))

Preparing your clips:

These can all be found:

• Converting Waves - Link: www.hlss.us - Converting Wavs
• Bass / Volume - Link: www.hlss.us - Reducing Bass and Volume
• Voice Codecs - Link: www.hlss.us - Voice Codecs and Sound Quality

But I posted them below just because less than half of the people reading this article will actually pay attention unless I do.

Converting Wavs

A common thought new users of HLSS have is the idea that you can play any sound, as long as it has the .wav extension... this is incorrect! A wav file has settings in it that must be changed in order for it to play correctly over the microphone in Steam games. If you try to play just any old .wav file without converting it correctly it could do one of the following: sound terrible, not play at all, or crash your game.

This article will teach you how to properly convert a .wav file. Once you have properly converted a .wav the way this article shows you, then it's ready to be played in the game with HLSS! With that being said, here's the steps to convert a .wav:

Step 1
- You are going to have to change the quality settings in the wav, so we will use the program called dBpowerAMP Music Converter to make those changes. If you don't have it, you will need to download it and install it. You can find it in the [ur=http://www.hlss.us/index.php?p=1l]downloads section[/url], or at it's official website. Once you have it downloaded and installed, move on to step 2.

Step 2
- Open dBpowerAMP. It will ask you which music file(s) you would like to convert. Locate the file(s) you want to convert (mp3 or wav will work), and then click open.



Step 3
- In the next window, you will have to set the program's options differently depending upon the type of engine your game uses:

- For Half-Life 1 engine based games:


- For Source engine based games:


The rest of the settings in this window are optional. They just let you choose where you want the wav file(s) to go when the conversion is complete, if it should delete the original file(s), etc... so you can adjust those settings to your own preference.

Step 4
- Now just click convert. It will take a moment to convert your wav(s). After that, you're done! You now have a correctly converted wav file!

Reducing Bass and Volume

Some songs have a lot of bass in them, or are just too loud for the microphone. This makes them sound bad when played. This article will teach you how to reduce the bass and volume for your sound using a program called GoldWave.

Please only follow this article AFTER you have converted your wav by following the Converting Wavs guide on this website. GoldWave will NOT be used for converting your wav, but only for reducing the bass and volume, so you should have the wav properly converted before hand.

Step 1
- You are going to need to download and install GoldWave if you haven't already. You can find it in the downloads section. After it's installed, open it up. By default you will see a help file. Just close out of that, you wont need it.

Step 2
- Now that the GoldWave is open, click the open button . Locate your wav that you would like to reduce the bass or volume in, and open it up. There is a single method that will work with every sound that is too loud, or had too much bass. After the wav is open, you may notice that the green and red bars are touching the top of the chart. You want these to be short and not too tall to where they are touching the top and bottom of the grid. So heres how to adjust it:

- Click 'Effect' at the top of the program, point to 'Filter', and finally click Equalizer. In the window that pops up, you will see a bar that looks like this:


Move the bar to the left to lower the bass and volume. You can preview how it will sound be clicking to play, and to stop the preview. You will have to re-click play each time you adjust the volume to hear the new outcome. Normally you only need to mode this bar just a little bit to the left. It doesn't need to be way over in the green or else you might not even hear the sound. Click OK when you are ready to adjust this Master (dB) setting, and it will take a moment to do its job. Once it's done, you will notice that the green and red lines have shrunk... which is what you want! Now just click File > Save and you're all done! It should be ready to play with HLSS!

Voice Codecs and Sound Quality

Please note: This article is written for Steam games that run the Half-Life 1 engine! Source engine based games do not use the same commands or codecs mentioned below; therefore, this article does not apply to them. As of March 12, 2007, all Source based games (by default) will be using the vaudio_speex codec which is designed to make microphone quality much better than it was in the past. If you converted your .wav files correctly, they should sound fine in Source based games.

Sometimes you may notice that a wav doesn't sound very good while being played over the microphone. The problem is almost always on the server's end, NOT YOURS!

Many server owners don't know that they can increase the sound quality for all voice communication on their server with a few simple rcon commands. And best of all, this won't cause the server any lag.

The 2 rcon commands are:
------------------
sv_voicecodec voice_speex
sv_voicequality 5
---------------

On the second rcon command listed above, you can set the number 5 from 1-5 with 1 being the lowest sound quality, 5 being the highest.

ALL 5 LEVELS use LESS BANDWIDTH than the default voice codec that is enabled on servers (which is voice_miles), so there's no reason why every server shouldn't change their voice codecs immediately. Levels 2-5 also have BETTER quality than the default codec miles! The miles codec only has 1 level that can't be changed either.

Here are the technical specs of the codec voice_speex in case you are interested:
------------------
» Level 1: 6 bytes/frame, 2400bps, lowest quality
» Level 2: 15 bytes/frame, 6000bps
» Level 3: 20 bytes/frame, 8000bps
» Level 4: 28 bytes/frame, 11200bps
» Level 5: 38 bytes/frame, 15200bps, highest quality
------------------

So what can you do now? Go to your favorite servers and see how the voice quality is. If its really fuzzy and choppy tell a mod, or even the owner that they can increase the quality with those 2 rcon commands listed above. Placing the commands in their server.cfg file will also execute the commands automatically when the server starts up so there is good quality the next time the server has to reboot. These commands will make the voice communication sound a lot better, and it uses less bandwidth!

How does it use less bandwidth? - The speex codec was designed to utilize more of the server's CPU for processing voice communication. It will increase the amount of CPU cycles on a server, but will cut back on bandwidth at the same time! Admin's don't need to worry about using up more cpu power either... the speex codec only uses 1 - 2% more from tests done at VALVe (according to their Support pages)!

I hope this article clears of some any confusion you may have about voice codecs or sound quality. Have fun!

Digg (where I found it): Digg - How to stream music over Ventrillo/Ingame chat
Link (to original article): How to stream music over Ventrillo/Ingame chat

[WhaDaFuxUp]

I have wonderd how to do this for a while , thanks

[weaponzero]

I've always wanted to do this too , good guide thanks =D.

[Uncontrolable]

Another way to do it, is to go settings (This is for ventrilo, much easyer way )
Where it says "Hardware input mixer (Optinal)" click down the first one, and press the name of ur audio driver name (w/e, try some of them) and then press the next one, and press Recording. and the third, press Stereomix. And then you should just hold in ur button (with Push to talk) and play a sound, then they should be able to hear it

[Purple]

Or you could just download the mod Music Player for ingame music?

[OblivionMage]

Or you could just download the mod Music Player for ingame music?

That takes out the whole fun / point of playing music over vent.

[vaeldas]

Neat, I'll have to try it!