Request: Removal of Music Attenuation

[Ruairi]

One problem that some of us have found when making music mods is the audio not playing as loud as expected in game. I poked around the .ini files and found out that almost every single music queue in Freelancer has a high amount of negative attenuation (fancy way of saying decreased volume). Even if you put the music slider all the way up, the track still won't play at full volume.

This can be a problem when certain tracks in our music packs are originally low volume. Meaning, in order to hear the song at the desired level, you may need to amplify the track in a program such as Audacity. Though, there's one particular side-effect that gets in the way of this: clipping. Clipping is quite annoying, as it can damage speakers and make audio extremely unpleasant to listen to (due to distortion).

So what's the solution? Well, remove the attenuation from all the music tracks in music.ini file. Obviously, players can't do this themselves, as modifying .ini files is not allowed. Therefore, the developers would have to set the attenuation to 0, so that all tracks play at full volume. The Freelancer default tracks would be rather loud because of this, but you can simply readjust the music volume slider like normal. It would be AWESOME for those that make music packs if the developers could do this.

If you want a quick, horrible demonstration, here's this video. Pardon my voice, it's just now breaking (also I stutter and repeat myself a lot, I'm sorry for being bad at talking).

Thank you in advance,
- Ruairi.