Station and System Dialog Dev

[badmonkey]

I've been revisiting Freelancer after putting it down for a couple of years. When I last left, Freelancer TNG was "the" mod. Now I see it's Discovery (well deserved, IMHO - great work devs). In exploring by playing single player, I notice that there are a lot of missing bits of station and system related dialog. I have a background in musical audio/sampling and game dev, so I wanted to do something about that or at least try.

I found voices_space_female.ini, voices_space_male.ini, voices_base_female.ini and voices_base_male.ini. They seem to have the audio embedded in them. I tried opening/un-compressing them using various ini tools I found at www.swat-portal.com, but nothing seems to understand these files.

Here are my questions:

1. Are these files special in some way? Are they not RAR compressed like other ini files?

2. After #1 has been solved and I can get to the samples, does anyone know how they are tied into the game itself? Is it a simple naming convention, do I have to edit other ini files or do I have to muck with the bases themselves to bind new files? I ask this because I have limited time to contribute. If most of my time will end up being altering the ini files, I fear I won't have time to worry about the audio (and thus chase something I may never get far on or finish).

3. Is there anyone who has attempted this that may have advice or (at worst) reasons that the task may be impossible?

For now, I'm just researching the scope of what I'd like to contribute. I'm not making a commitment at the moment, so please don't get hopes up yet.

Thanks for a great mod that makes Freelancer new (yet) again and thanks in advance for any help you can give me.

-bm