Work is coming along fairly nicely with version 5.00. I was a little under the weather this past weekend and didn't feel like doing much, so I did nothing all day except for pull sound from races over the last two seasons. I ended up with around 300 raw samples when the dust settled.

While giving them a listen and letting my mind work at how I could use them, I quickly remembered two of things that I hate about building spotter packs. 1) The constant changing of audio quality from race to race. I desperately want the same voice tone for each respective guy throughout the pack. It just doesn't sound realistic to me if some clips are clear, and some are muffled, or if the quality is good in some, and horrible in the next. I have 12 "Pit road is open" calls, and it sounds like 4 different guys saying it, that's how varied the source quality can get.

2) While listening to my 12 "Pit road is open" calls, I couldn't help but think that it would be so cool if I could actually use all 12 instead of just 1. The whole spotter dynamic would come alive if you could use unlimited clips for every trigger. Every race would sound very different than the last, and you could continually keep adding on to spotter packs instead of just swapping out clips. Hopefully iRacing will mix that ability into the spotter component in the future.

Other than that, I still have work to do, but I'm happy with how it's coming along so far. It will probably be done sooner than I thought, as I'm finding myself a little more motivated than I thought I'd be. It's only 11:30p.. time to dive back in.

Work has begun on the next version of the spotter pack, and it's going well. I'm currently going through the difficult task of listening to my archive of races, right now at Darlington in May of 2009. It's only difficult from the standpoint of time involved.

Each race compiles into about 25 minutes of solid audio, give or take. Lots of races = lots of hours invested. So the challenge is to stay motivated to really listen and not have the audio fall into background noise. That's tough to do when I'm watching TV, painting cars, browsing the net, writing this thing, etc. You almost have to re-wire your brain to always listen for stuff, even when concentrating on other things.

Anyway, I've pulled a lot of Earl Barban stuff thus far, with lots more to come. The biggest challenge so far is figuring out how to do the 3-wide calls. Unlike Chris Osborne who says, "3-wide you're on the top," Earl says, "2-wide inside." The hard part is how to transition from a 3-wide to a 2-wide. Chris does a, "3-wide you're on top... two wide." Earl does a, "2-wide inside.... 1 inside." The issue is that the iRacing files are set up for how Chris calls it. No matter where you are in a 3-wide, when it becomes 2-wide, the software will play the "2wide" file. So it looks like I'm going to have to piece something together. I'll figure it out.

After I go through the races and pull all the Earl audio, the next step is to process the audio into the correct file specs, clean it up, and to make sure the volume and tone is close to what's already in there. Then it's testing time to make sure all is cool and nothing explodes.

One thing is for sure, I really don't miss the days when I had no idea what played when or where. This thing is so much easier to do when I can build a full spotter pack without even loading up the sim.

In creating the spotter, it's always a series of decisions and trade offs. I like to go as outside of the box as you can get, yet, not have the intended message get lost.

For instance, we have the stock, "You're in 5th place." That's a little too boring for me, and honestly, it's very hard to find any audio of a spotter or CC saying that. There are scoring towers all over the place, I'm sure the drivers sneak a peak and already know that they're in 5th place. Same with iRacing. As drivers, whether we have F1 or F3 open, you already know what place you're in, no need to tell us.

So I look at those 12 triggers as complete wildcards, putting in there anything that I want to. Your in 1st-5th, you're back in 1st-5th, top 10, top 20. If you've used this pack or the NR03 pack for any amount of time, you pretty much know what I'm trying to accomplish.

I'm starting to stray off into a "spotter pack creation theory" dialog, so I'll get back on track.

In doing it how I do it, there are things that don't sound right. In no particular order...

With 4 laps to go in a race, Chad starts telling you that he's pitting you in about 3 laps or so. What!? Why!? Well, you've got about 5 laps of gas left in the tank, that's why he says it. At this point in time, the sim doesn't abort triggers if they're irrelevant. So my decision was to either put in the stock "5 laps of gas left," or go with something more realistic. I chose realism, which makes absolutely no sense when triggered late in a race where pitting isn't required.

Copy that for 2 laps of gas left as well, except this time Chad is yelling at you to pit. I don't like that it does that, I can't control it, so it is what it is.

You get those a lot in qualifying as well. Hopefully iRacing develops that a little bit further in the future. In the mean time, always defer to your F4 window.

Another oddity is taking the checkers, but Chad or Chris tells you something that leads you to think that the race is still going on. As mentioned before, it's probably one of those "you're in 3rd" type messages. Those really shouldn't be played when the race is over, but again, that isn't up to me.

In closing, I always have to make a decision when replacing an utterance. Do I match it up and have it say the same thing as the defaults, or do I get creative and go an entirely different direction with the verbiage. I tend to go the creative route just because it sounds more realistic. The side effect is that it opens up the possibilities to sounding completely out of place in certain situations. That's just the nature of the beast.

So yes, I hear it too, and I don't like it either. :)

Work is moving along on Version 3 of the JJ Pack. I plan to release it soon after the next build arrives for us in a few weeks. Speaking of which, it's a little difficult to work on it while not knowing what the next update holds. So I like to think that I'm doing prep work.

I used to think it was easy making a spotter pack. Capture sound, listen to sound, pull what sounds like it might possibly fit somewhere now, or at some point later. Sounds easy enough. But when you're listening to sound, focus must be maintained. You almost have to do nothing else but listen. I have the habit of watching TV, or browsing the internet while I'm listening. Many times, you only hear half of it since your attention is divided. It turns into background noise.

So I started going through my mountain of captured sound, and I missed a lot of things. I kept thinking, "Why didn't I pull that when I first listened to this???" Still, I miss the days when I first started this. So few things to listen to, and so much to listen for. Nowadays, I've got around 90 races on file, comprising of at least 160 hours of dialog. The fun part is thinking that you heard a certain phrase in some race, something that would be perfect, then trying to find it. See: needle in haystack. But that doesn't stop me from blowing 3 hours looking for it!

My main focus now is organization. When the new files are listed soon, I should be ready. This post had no particular purpose or reason. I just wanted to write something in this blog thingy. It comes with the website, so why not, right?