Jim,
Did you save your .wav file as 11025 samples/second, mono and 8 bits? If not, download the free version WAVEPAD and use it to edit your sound file. It is also easy with it to see if the sound is too loud which will cause distortion.
Don
I am working on putting Digitrax sound in an RS11. I started with the RS32 project from the Digitrax Sound Depot. Not completely satisfied with the engine sounds, I decided I'd try to make some improvements. This may be tougher than it looks!
First, I needed to know what these Alco's sound like. Fortunately, this is the information age, and there are many railfan videos on Youtube. I quickly located some appropriate videos. To harvest sound snippets from these videos, I used a software program called Freecorder. It allows one to create a wave file in one of several formats, including one compatible with the decoder, of any audio file currently being played. It is free for the download, installs a toolbar in either Internet Explorer or Firefox. I recorded the audio from the videos I selected. I'm sure there are copywrites on at least some of these - not sure if it would be appropriate to ask for permission to use snippets from them or not.
Now that I had my sample, I needed to extract a section of sound that I could loop for an engine run sound under a relatively heavy load. For that, I ended up using Creative WaveStudio. It will take some practice to figure out how to get a section of the right length with the correct beginning and ending so that when it loops it sounds ok. I did reasonably well, but not great, on my first try.
Then it was simple to open up a sound project in SoundLoader, assign my new file to a sound, save the project, and program it with the PR2. Then the real trouble began... It sounded distorted. My first guess was too much volume, so I reduced it to 25%. Now it doesn't sound too loud relative to the other sounds, but it's still pretty distorted. I'm thinking my sample had too much low frequency in it, and the speaker can't reproduce it.
Now that I have some experience, I think I could use some pointers ... Experts?
Thanks,
Jim