Nice job with the TZ, seems like a very fun game to tweak the sounds on!

Pinballnews.com is reporting that Pinsound now supports Stern Whitestar boards. Anyone have an actual update on this? I'm hoping to use it on a LOTR someday.

They hinted their would be some news in Texas but I haven't seen anything yet.

I think I had to go through 3 or 4 flash drives before I got one that worked. I don't know what the problem is (PinSounds fault or the flash drives?) but it eventually worked.

For what its worth the one that worked was an 8GB USB3.0 while the ones that didnt were 64gb or 32gb.

My LOTR is so ready for this! Come on PinSound make it happen!

Ordered speakers and a pinsound kit from France a few months ago and it arrived without much delay.

Now I just have to find the time to do the board work on LOTR!

If anyone is still on the fence about buying PinSound I would jump right in. It will crank your enthusiasm for an old game to 11.

To each his own I guess. Mine play the THX intro music and shake the house during their boot sequence; it's an epic experience just turning the Pinsound games on let alone playing them!

You just have to add a file called boot.wav and put it into the audio folder on the usb stick. Boot.wav can have whatever audio you want in it. A program like Audacity can help you make one if you don't know where to start.

PinSound is hard. To do it right takes a time and some good knowledge about digital audio.

I keep seeing people complaining about sounds getting too quiet. There is an audio engineering term called “ducking”. It’s when one audio track volume is lowered whenever another audio track is played at the same time.

PinSound uses ducking to make it easier to hear individual sounds over one another when they play at the same time. Each mix can have its own settings and if they are setup poorly you are going to hear the sound getting quiet and having odd volume issues.

To edit the ducking settings you have to modify the text file on the USB stick. If you want ducking off set all values to 100. Usually a tiny amount of ducking is what you want so things like call outs can be heard.

Compared to ColorDMD where its basically plug and play PinSound requires a ton more tweaking. For me it’s 100% worth it though. I’ve put maybe 80 hours of tweaking into each game I’ve PinSounded. Its a labor of love and the results blow peoples minds and have made each game incredibly addictive.

Elaborating on the ducking issue...

The specific file to change on the USB stick is called "config.ini" and it will look something like this:

-----------------------------------------------------
; PinSound board config file

; to be saved in USB:/config.ini

[main]

debug = false ; Enable DEBUG mode

psrec = false ; Enable PSREC recording (see PinSound Studio)

sleep = 400 ; Time (seconds) before auto-pausing music when there are no audio events

ducking_jingle = 8
ducking_sfx = 80
ducking_voice = 65
--------------------------------------------------

Jingle, SFX, Voice are all related to the folder structure PinSound uses. If a sound is in the Jingle folder than when it is triggered the game will set the musics volume to whatever the ducking_jingle value is. As soon as the jingle stops playing the music returns to it's normal volume.

Jingles are typically short musical clips that you will want to hear in isolation, therefore the ducking_jingle is set very low at 8. If you wanted to completely mute the background music a value of 0 should be used.

When a game triggers a call out the music volume will be set to the level of ducking_voice. In this case I have it at 65 so the music will lower a touch in order for the voices to be heard. This is the same exact effect you'll hear on the radio when a DJ talks over background music.

You will generally want all sound effects to be played without adjusting the music volume much. A value between 100-80 is best for ducking_sfx.

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Let's give a few examples of some problem solving:

Q. All of my call outs are too quiet and when sound effects play the music gets all quiet.

A. You need to adjust the "gain.txt" file inside your "voice" folder and you need to adjust the ducking_sfx value in "config.ini"

Q. One specific sound effect is too loud.

A. Put a "gain.txt" file inside that sound effects specific folder and set the value to 10 or lower.

Q. The music keeps cutting out whenever there are call outs but the call outs are also too quiet.

A. Adjust the ducking_voice setting in "config.ini" to a value between 60-100. Add a "gain.txt" file inside the "voice" folder with a value of 10 or higher.

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Hopefully this can help people a bit. I'd hate to see a bunch of people give up on PinSound because of a single line a text file.

The other good examples are 100% in violation of every copyright known to man

Set ducking_sfx to 80 or higher. 100 would turn it off completely and that may be even better for you. voice should probably be 60-80 range and jingle 0-15.

Experiment and see if you can find something that works!