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Sound effect editing

I've always found sound editing amusing, and have done this since I first figured out how to do it. My first soundcard was a MediaVision Thunderboard and bundled with it was an early version of Sound Forge. Whenever I got a new game I would check the content structure just to see how easy it was to edit the sounds. To this day I still edit game sounds. Although not the gamer I used to be; I mostly play classic games now. However, one game I've never changed the sound effects for is Doom.

The Doom sounds are just too much a part of the game and by changing them the spirit of Doom would be lost. Being sampled at only 11 kHz, the quality of the Doom sounds is quite bad, so I have over the past couple of years tried to gather/remake as many as possible of the original Doom sounds in high quality. Many of them are from the Sound Ideas sound effect library.

Finding the Doom sounds proved to be difficult and time consuming; a sound effect can be a tiny little part hidden within an audio track and it can have a different frequency, be time stretched, reversed and mixed with other sounds. Some of the sounds will probably never be properly recreated or found as they are recorded by Bobby Prince and not stock sound effects.

So far I've whipped up 77 more or less accurate replicas of the 107 original sound effects. I've tried to keep the volume fairly equal to the Bobby Prince originals, but some sounds are fattened up a bit. The new and old sounds do blend quite nicely together.

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The sounds explained

All weapon sounds (including the explosion) are found, except the Plasma rifle.

Fist/berserk

The punch sound; it's right there!

Chainsaw

I am pleased to say that all sounds are just about identical. You may recognize these chainsaw sounds from Army of Darkness and the Ogre in Quake. At first I didn't find the DSSAWHIT sound, but after some time I found a part of the chainsaw clip where it was slowing down after full speed, then reversed it - then the real DSSAWHIT was there!
The difficulty in making the chainsaw sounds was to cut them to correct start point. The DSSAWFUL and DSSAWHIT sounds are played very rapidly and this produce a certain sound which I wanted to be as close to the original as possible.

Pistol/Chaingun

Not 100% perfect, but close enough. I whished the chaingun used a different firing sound.

Shotgun/Super shotgun

The shotgun sounds had to be constructed, as the regular shotgun fire sound is a modified version of the explosion. The super shotgun has the same sound, but with a big boom added on top. I managed to make some fairly good replicas and all reload sounds are spot-on.

Rocket launcher

This was another construction process and by listening to the original, I divided it into three parts:
1. A initial short thump
2. A second bigger thump
3. The rocket flying swoosh sound
Then it was just to mix them together approximately close to the original. My rocket launcher sound is slightly quicker than the original, but it works.

BFG-9000

Yet more construction work. The charge up sound was easy and quickly found; a sound often used in movies, commercials and games. The BFG fireball/explosion sounds were a bit more work; they are of a very old sound archive so the sound quality is poor. I filtered and tweaked them to sound better and they ended up quite good.

Player sounds

All player sounds are good to go. To my big surprise I stumbled over the DSNOWAY/DSOOF sound - the player makes this sound when you try to open a door that's not there and when hitting the ground. I never in the world thought I would find this sound, so when I did I was overwhelmed with joy!
The pain sound is a classic and 100% identical. I am not completely sure about the regular death scream, but the extreme death scream is dead-on. Oddly enough I found the power up sound, but no item sound.

Plats, doors and mechanics

The plats and door sounds are in place, also the fast door sounds which are shortened versions of the regular sounds. I was also so lucky to find the main switch sound which actually is a washing machine being switched on (one of those big ones I suppose). The "switch off" sound is not found, but it's only used to get out of the menu. The stone move sound is basically just brown noise so I just made some noise with the same length.

The monsters

All Possessed Human and Imp sounds are in place. The Imp idle sound was not easy to make as the original sound lasts about 6 seconds and it's time stretched down to just under a second. When time stretching this much you don't have a lot of control on how the end result sounds, although I got it sounding pretty close to the original. The very important monster fireball and scratching claw sounds are present in their original high quality form.
Pinky is missing the attack sound. I thought this sound would be easy to find as it sounds like a attacking tiger, but still no luck. It can be two sounds mixed together.
The Lost Soul scream is a slowed down bat, and two pissed off jaguars are the source for the Hell Knight death.
Pain Elemental sight sound is from the same sound set as the Imp sight sounds (modified horse sounds I think), although I had to adjust the sampling rate way up and add some slight echo to get it sounding right. For the Revenant I've found these sounds; punch, arm swing, death and constructed the missile launch sound.

The Mancubus sight sound was a bit tricky:
By listening carefully to it I figured it consisted of some jaguar sounds mixed with a deep moaning sound. I had the jaguar sounds, but still the moan was a problem, until I recognized it; it's of course the sight sound for the Octabrain in Duke Nukem 3D! The Octabrain sight sound is of very poor quality (8 kHz), but that didn't matter as when I mixed it with the jaguar sounds, the Mancubus sight sound was born... again. The Mancubus attack scream is a slowed down sound of a pig.

Archvile sounds found are DSVILATK and DSFLAME - it's sourced from a tiny part of a continuous sound of burning fire, but I recognize a Doom sound when I hear one. I've also found DSFLAMST, but I am not sure if it's used anywhere. The Spider Mastermind sight sound is found 100% accurate. And at last, with big thanks to Zack F for making me aware of the source for DSMETAL, it's finally found. With the discovery of the DSMETAL source, the Arachnotron walk could be recreated as it use a speed up version of DSMETAL mixed with a motor sound. The Cyberdemon DSHOOF walk is found - it's a slowed down punch. The Cyberdemon death sound is a Possessed Human sound mixed with a slightly different version of the explosion. The Icon of Sin cube-spit is a very recognizable sound which is used in countless movies and TV productions.

That's basically it. Some of the remaining sounds could be remade without using the original material I suppose, but the sounds wouldn't be true to the originals. The only hope for a complete package is that Bobby Prince/id Software still got the original sound effects material...