Full-volume monster sounds are not normalized

[sinisterseed]

Alternatively, just record what the game is doing while your hardware is turned off, that should also do it.

[Chris]

So you mean it's a windows problem and must be addressed in GZDoom itself?

It's either a Windows problem or a GZDoom problem, depending on how you look at it. From what it seems, the underlying issue is the game plays the same sound tens or hundreds of times simultaneously. Since sound mixing is additive, this results in the sound playing at a couple tens or hundreds times the normal volume. A limiter reduces the amplitude of sounds around loud peaks, essentially bringing the offending sound back down to 1x normal volume (though other sounds played at the same time are also reduced, so all sounds keep relative volume). Apparently, however, Windows' built-in limiter has a limit, so it won't reduce the 200x or whatever volume of the cyberdemon sounds back to 1x, but still keeps it too high, whereas OpenAL Soft's limiter manages to still keep it in check.

But it could also be argued that perhaps GZDoom shouldn't try playing the same boss death sound (or other local/"full-volume" sound) multiple times at the same time. At least so many of them, anyway. It already prevents pickup sounds from stacking for this reason.

[Graf Zahl]

I think what it really should do is to ignore the distance for the $limit when playing an unattenuated sound.

[drfrag]

I don't think only boss sounds are affected, i notice that when i die and resurrect surrounded by several monsters of the same type the see sounds are played much louder and i don't think i'm imagining things.

[Graf Zahl]

Of course they are, but for that case the $limit kicks in and will prevent too many from playing because the monsters are nearby and distance attenuation will also help. But with unattenuated boss sounds none of the mechanisms to keep sound in check will do anything to contain the volume.

[Graf Zahl]

Should be better now. I now apply attenuation to the limit distance as well but also increased the limit to the boss sounds to 4 because that's still safe. This no longer runs a risk of speaker overkill.

[drfrag]

I did the nuts test and the OpenAL Soft limiter doesn't make any difference with the game master volume at 0.05 in fact it was the same with the old dll. No harm done but i'm not going to test it with a higher volume (i don't know when the volume limiter kicked in), the sound is strong enough. The later ingame fix definitely works.
LZDoom is also affected and the issue is serious enough, i wonder if it's windows only.

[Graf Zahl]

I'd play it safe. Playing the countless copies of same sound at the same time produces loud noise at best and serious damage at worst. It's best to avoid such situations right at the source, like my fix.

[Chris]

I did the nuts test and the OpenAL Soft limiter doesn't make any difference with the game master volume at 0.05 in fact it was the same with the old dll.

The master volume is multiplied with the per-sound volume, affecting the volume of each individual sound but doesn't influence the overall output limit. So despite the sounds being at 5% its usual volume, the boss sounds or whatever still accumulate up to 100% amplitude (-1...+1 sample values) before the limiter kicks in.