Talk: Sound table

Excessive number of columns

This template currently has an excessive number of columns, and is frequently wider than the page itself (as seen on Ravager#Sounds and Nether Bricks#Sounds). A large part of it is technical information that's not well explained and might not be useful to most readers. For example:

• "stream" and "preload" have no effect on how sounds is heard in-game, and is only relevant for resource-pack creators
• It's not clear that "pitch" and "volume" are multipliers (and not, say, volume/pitch relative to other sounds)
• Some people might not understand how pitch multipliers work (e.g. that 2x pitch is an octave higher), and therefore be unable to visualize how they affect the sound
• It's not explained how the duplicate pitch, volume and attenuation distance interact with each other
• Some sounds have separate pitches, volumes, or other sounds.json arguments for each individual sound. The individual sounds don't have any identifiers in the template, so attempting to refer to them is confusing (e.g. Ocelot#Sounds)

It may be argued that the values can be explained through tooltips (as some are already), but tooltips don't work on mobile view and having to hover over a bunch of them to get explanations doesn't seem like the best approach.

I propose to remove the less understandable/relevant columns (pitch, volume, stream, preload); renaming "attenuation distance" to "audible distance" and combining it to a single value to make it more understandable. Individual sounds.json values and their explanations are already on Sounds.json. However, perhaps that could be revamped into a more general "Sound event" page (or separate pages for Java and Bedrock), with the hardcoded values included and explained as well, and the table changed to a more readable format (perhaps splitting by category). Even if that ends up requiring a similarly wide table, it would be limited to a single page and not every page that has sounds. –Sonicwave ^talk 23:44, 18 August 2020 (UTC)

I forgot to comment here. I created Template:Sound table/editcopy in an attempt to make a non-table version. Moving away any fields, or "merging" them will result in incomplete documentation. Reducing the table and linking to a dedicated page is also duplicating a bunch of the content then. So here's a non-table approach, that I kinda like; it's still being worked on and should really be converted to LUA. FVbico (talk) 08:00, 19 September 2020 (UTC)

I removed the new columns (for now) as they weren't being applied anyway... Dhranios (talk) 07:48, 1 October 2020 (UTC)

footsteps and "fall on the block" are coming from players

They are not come from blocks. Can test it by only open player sound and fall or step the blocks. Most of the tables are wrong. including Predefined tables.--Snow Dash（Talk & Contributions） 15:01, 28 December 2020 (UTC)

It seems that many block interactions (including this and sliding on honey blocks, for example) use whatever entity is interacting with them for the source. It makes me think there should be another category for things like that. - CrowdingFaun624 (talk) 23:42, 19 August 2022 (UTC)

Redundant columns on JE?

We have Description and Subtitle. I think these are almost always the same (unless for some reason a sound has no subtitle). So we end up typing pretty much the same thing twice. I'm wondering if we really need the description at all. The only reason I can think of to keep is is what I said regarding sounds with no subtitles, but it seems like a lot of duplication for the 1% case. What does anyone else think? - AD OffKilter (talk) 15:54, 30 July 2022 (UTC)

I can see some instances where a separate description would be useful to clarify exactly when the sound plays, which often isn't indicated by the subtitle. For example on Warden#Sounds, the subtitles alone don't clearly indicate which sounds are played when the warden is being called by a shrieker, idle or aggroing. That said however, as mentioned in an above section I think this template in general is large and unwieldy, already being unable to fit within the normal page width, and containing technical values that aren't explained and may therefore be hard to understand to the average person looking for sounds. –Sonicwave ^talk 20:46, 30 July 2022 (UTC)

Yes, I had actually written a response to the above earlier but abandoned it. I think the pitch/volume is fairly unnecessary knowledge. What do you do with it as a player, or even a mod writer? Plus sometimes even with the base pitch they still do random variations in code. The distance is useful, though. I would vote to remove the pitch/volume and rename distance as you indicated above. - AD OffKilter (talk) 21:09, 30 July 2022 (UTC)

I think that there are many situations in which the description is very useful. Some sounds, like the panda sounds, are impossible to tell what makes them if there isn't a description. Firework rockets also have a lot of additional sound data that isn't said anywhere else. I'm not completely sure about volume, pitch, and distance, though. I have used them before, when trying to replicate a lever sound to pretend a lever was being flicked in a command block creation. In many cases, they do have constant volumes and pitches, but other times they have additional randomness, which makes writing the values down difficult. - CrowdingFaun624 (talk) 17:23, 23 August 2022 (UTC)

I've since come around to agreeing we need description for the reasons you mentioned. I think volume and pitch should probably go away. Not only are they dubious, but given that they are complicated to figure out as you need to look at sounds.json and the code to know the right answer. Given they could change from release to release, I would fear the amount of maintenance in order to keep it right at all times. So high cost to maintain + questionable value to me mean we should drop them. - AD OffKilter (talk) 18:19, 23 August 2022 (UTC)

I think I most likely agree with you. - CrowdingFaun624 (talk) 05:51, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

A big problem with the sound tables is that they are very wide, especially Java Editions' tables, like on drowned's. Most of the space is taken up by the resource location and translation key, since they can't form new lines on periods, unlike descriptions. If we could make it split on periods that would reduce the width wonderfully. - CrowdingFaun624 (talk) 00:53, 4 October 2022 (UTC)

New source category for Sound table template

Some mobs, when interacting with something else's sounds, use their own sources rather than the other. For example, a pillager walking on a block of amethyst uses the block of amethyst's footstep sounds, but with the Hostile Creatures source. This also applies to items such as totems of undying and honey_block sliding sounds, but strangely not pillager crossbow sounds. The template will not use anything other than the sources listed in the documentation, so it cannot be done without changing its code. I think that a new source should be added to the template, perhaps called depends and displayed at "Depends on the Mob", or something else that conveys the information. In addition, all entities should have a bit of information in the sounds category that describes their default source when used for these interactions. I do not have the know-how to do any of this in the code, and also want better name suggestions. - CrowdingFaun624 (talk) 22:49, 9 September 2022 (UTC)

As mentioned in the other talk page, I would support this and can help with code if need be. Putting here as well for completeness. - AD OffKilter (talk) 23:11, 9 September 2022 (UTC)

I think a none/-/"None" (displayed as "None") would be useful for unused sound events. I've found the place in the code, and it seems like it'll be a very simple operation. I will call the other one precisely dependent/"Entity-Dependent", instead of "Mob-Dependent" since armor stands make honey block sliding sounds and aren't mobs. - CrowdingFaun624 (talk) 03:23, 10 September 2022 (UTC)

Volume and Pitch question

In sounds.json, there are some sounds that have their pitches and volumes listed, and many that don't. Stone's template page, for example, has these values listed, but they are not in sounds.json. How were these values obtained? - CrowdingFaun624 (talk) 19:09, 21 August 2022 (UTC)

It seems you might already be aware based on the discussion on your talk page but some sound events are played at different volumes and pitches in the code, as opposed to individual sounds having defined pitch and volume values in sounds.json. I'm not sure if that's the case with the stone block template and haven't checked the code for it however. I wasn't under the impression that there were such large variances in pitch and volume between the different block sounds. –Sonicwave ^talk 06:30, 23 August 2022 (UTC)

BTW, since you're working on sound tables I wonder if you have any thoughts about the discussions above about cleaning up or removing some of the technical columns including pitch and volume. In addition to what I've said previously, it's not clear whether these columns represent the values in sounds.json or in the code itself. The template says "plays this sound event at", but IIRC sounds.json only specifies pitch and volume for individual sounds (which there's currently no way to represent in the template) and it's the code that does it for the actual event. On the other hand, attenuation distance is only a sounds.json field (and I haven't been able to determine what it does exactly, it seems to get mixed with the volume in a certain way). –Sonicwave ^talk 06:41, 23 August 2022 (UTC)

No way to have empty sound parameter

In some rare circumstances, a block can have no sounds in-game but still have a sound event happen. For example, hanging roots don't have falling, hitting, or stepping sounds (which is the case in sounds.json). The sounds are present within the files, though. I think that a way for "None" to be in the sound parameter should be possible, because the "?" that appears may be misleading (and I also want to remove it from the missing sounds category). Or should I just add the sounds? If doing that, the description should be "Unused sounds" (different from "Unused sound event"). - CrowdingFaun624 (talk) 06:08, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

Just noticed you can use a dash. Whoops. - CrowdingFaun624 (talk) 20:08, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

New source category for Sound table template

Some mobs, when interacting with something else's sounds, use their own sources rather than the other. For example, a pillager walking on a block of amethyst uses the block of amethyst's footstep sounds, but with the Hostile Creatures source. This also applies to items such as totems of undying and honey_block sliding sounds, but strangely not pillager crossbow sounds. The template will not use anything other than the sources listed in the documentation, so it cannot be done without changing its code. I think that a new source should be added to the template, perhaps called depends and displayed at "Depends on the Mob", or something else that conveys the information. In addition, all entities should have a bit of information in the sounds category that describes their default source when used for these interactions. I do not have the know-how to do any of this in the code, and also want better name suggestions. - CrowdingFaun624 (talk) 22:08, 9 September 2022 (UTC)

If we did this, I think "Mob-dependent" might be a good term to use. I can help with the code if we all decide this is worthwhile. We might also want to move this discussion to the sound table talk page. - AD OffKilter (talk) 22:17, 9 September 2022 (UTC)

"Maximum number of loops have been performed"

I'm trying to add Bedrock Edition's sounds to the parrot page right now, but at approximately the 291th sound on the page, it starts showing "Maximum number of loops have been performed" in a big red font, and only shows one sound for each mob instead of the proper amount. - CrowdingFaun624 (talk) 20:18, 2 October 2022 (UTC)

This also occurs on the stairs page due to the new sound changes, and already occurs on slab's page. - CrowdingFaun624 (talk) 22:02, 20 October 2022 (UTC)

This likely occurs because ExtLoops is set only to 200, when it probably needs to be about 500 to cover pages like those listed above. - CrowdingFaun624 (talk) 01:42, 6 November 2022 (UTC)

Cool ideas

I think some new things need to be added to sound tables that add additional functionality.

1. Add a rowspan to go along with the sound parameter. This will reduce the number of sounds on the page for blocks, if implemented. This will fix pages such as stairs' and slabs' pages, if implemented. I have an example of this on my sandbox using a wikitable.
2. Add a parameter that allows any input into the source. This is useful for situations like goat's page, which needs to display both Hostile Creatures and Friendly Creatures for some sources, since it changed in 22w43a.
3. A parameter that disables the subtitles and translation keys on the table for historical things in Java Edition.
4. Not a parameter, but a category that includes all pages with non-transcluded sound tables.
5. For attenuation distance, sound tables should use a default of 16.

I don't know how to implement these, and would also like input from others. - CrowdingFaun624 (talk) 20:49, 26 October 2022 (UTC)

I'm not an expert on templates like this, but your sandbox looks interesting and more compact, which is what pages also need because of the many sounds being repeated. On your sandbox you also have a separate template for the parrot article, maybe it could be made into a template called Template:Parrot sound table, which would be transcluded on the parrot article. I like this so for now until someone makes a counterpoint, I  Support this. Supeika (talk) 01:10, 19 November 2022 (UTC)

Mining Sounds for the blocks

Hello world. I just noticied almost 1 hour ago than the Mining Sounds pitch for the blocks were strictly never uploaded on the wiki (including if the pitch is listed on all the pages). Because I have a special software for edit them and upload the pitched version for each blocks-mining sounds on the wiki. It's progressive, but I can probably be done for all of them within 3 days, or for one week maximum. What did everyone think of the idea? Shall I upload them? (please reply with  Support or  Oppose. Reverse88 (talk) 14:29, 5 July 2023 (UTC)

I  Support this. This also applies to the stepping (and jumping/landing) sounds. Placing and mining sounds would be pitched down to 0.8 for most blocks, while hit would be changed to 0.5, falling to 0.75, and stepping unchanged. For blocks with complicated pitches, such as bamboo's table, they should be pitched according to the note in the pitch column. In Bedrock Edition, I think that sounds within a range of pitches (e.g. 0.8-1.0 in stone's table) should not be changed, but others should. - CrowdingFaun624 (talk) 01:51, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

I think it would be better to use a JavaScript-based solution to repitch the existing sound files, but I can't guarantee when such functionality can be implemented. –Sonicwave ^talk 05:02, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

Ok. I have read the opinions. I think if still nobody is  Oppose, the pitched sounds will be uploaded once I'm back to home to use the related software to edit them and upload the new pitched versions matching the mining blocks sounds. Reverse88 (talk) 09:14, 17 August 2023 (UTC)