I just extracted the sound files from the BSA. File sizes are surprisingly small. I did a test on two files:

• Length: ~30 Seconds, Size: 170KB
  
• Length: <5 Seconds, Size: 17 KB

Please note that the original voice files include some lip synch data or whatever, I had to strip them out. Maybe there are still some meta-data in it, that would explain why the relative size of the first file is considerably smaller but still sounds much better.

The second file sounds pretty bad. If I listen to the file via "xWMAPlay" (which can be found http://www.din.or.jp/~ch3/down_e.html), it just sounds like a 11Khz WAV audio file from 1995. Converting it to WAV and playing with the normal Windows Media Player (using http://www.nazizombies.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=2511#p21960, it sounds way better. You can still hear compression, but it sounds brighter, now it's just people hissing, but not into tin cans anymore

Why is this? As far as I can see, the "xWMAPlay" makes direct use of the DirectX API whereas the Windows Media Player most probably uses other techniques.


So ... what now?

Hm, thanks for testing this Hammer. I don't think Bethesda reads through here though, unfortunately. What do...

Quite frankly, you can be 100% certain they will not redo the voices. Even if they are aware that this is an issue.
Im not trying to insult you or something, but the best solutions would be to ignore the bad quality (which is hard) or play the game on english. (to do that, change your steam language to english. Most of your games will do a small update and bam, english game.)

You don't seem to understand the issue, dandy. It's not the recording of the voices, probably just the compression of the files. Derpdaherp.

We've not come up with enough results and proof that there's something wrong on their end.

I'm pretty sure most people won't even notice such terrible audio compression, I've always been told I have pretty sensitive ears. Furthermore, we should have a "look" on the English, French and whatever sound files. Do they suffer from the same problem? And apart from that, we should pick out some spoiler-free audio files and discuss them - Probably some sound files from your companion in and finally out of the starter dungeon. Agree?

Sounds fair enough, Hammer.

I've got sensitive ears, too. I'm musician after all. It's very noticeable on my end, especially with headset.

I also hear the low quality german audio. It is very annoying. I am using Sennheiser highquality headphones and Xonar Xense Card. The problems for sure come from heavy compression. Only thing Bethesda has to do would be to release lesser compressed german audio files to fix it, i guess.
A friend of mine who also uses headphones hear this issue,too

I changed the audio to TV speaker output and i didn′t hear the bad compression issue. But that is for sure because of low quality TV speaker. So that was no solution.
Changing the game to english is no solution, too. I bought this game with german language and i want to play it in german language for the first playthrough.

Skyrim has high quality german syncronisation by well known professional artists. It′s a shame that their work gets damaged by low compression rates (that are not necessary).

Where did I say something about recording the voices?
I am sure the voices wont get fixed, no matter what the problem might be. They really never fix anything related to sounds, especially non-english soundfiles. Derpdaherp (am i cool yet)

No, not really

But to be honest, I would not get my hopes up either. Compressing half a minute down to about 25KB for an ancient entertainment device that does not even have a harddrive (yes, xbox) might be the only way, but [censored] my PC as an xbox emulator emitting sound files that could date back to 1995 is just sad, especially when you see how much work Mark Lampert and all the other guys put into the sound files and voice recordings

I'll see if I can lure some more people into this thread and try to contact either Gstaff / Nick Breckon or probably Mark Lampert directly. It's such a great game, marvellous voice actors and then everything's ruined by probably flicking the wrong switch when converting the files for the final game.

Hey,
for me it's the same... The german voices have an ugly echo effect as if the recordings were done in an empty hallway... I don't know if this is caused by low compression but it certainly sounds awful.
Do I really get the english version if I change my steam settings to english (this is my first steam game...)? But yeah, I'd like to play it in german so it would be great if the devs do sth.

QA is a lie.
I think it doesn't even exist anymore.
That's my theory.

If this game would have been QA Tested most of the obvious bugs wouldn't be there.

You can just go to your steam library, right click on Skyrim and go for properties, then you can change it to english. It'll download a language-pack for the game automatically. You don't need to change your whole steam to english.

The same problem with the german sound quality is in the Xbox version, very annoying -.-

To be honest, I would have expected that ALL versions suffer from this. Has anybody tested the English or French voice files yet?

This discussion about the poor quality can also be found in some german Elder Scrolls forums.

I can confirm this low quality voices in the german version too!
Sounds like an mp3 with only 64 Kbit/s or less. As already has been written, the voices sound as if the NPCs lisp.
Highly noticeable at NPCs with high-pitched voices (female NPCs).
For example, talking with Irileth, the Huscarl at Dragons Reach (Whiterun Castle) and ask her how a dark elf became a Huscarl.
Can you hear the hiss in the background? Especially in words with s, sch, z, f, in it.

That’s a really poor quality!

Bethesda, please give us not that much compressed german voice files!
This needs to be fixed!

Changing the audio quality of my speakers to 44.1k and 24 bit doesn’t help here.

I paid for the german version, playing the game in english is not an option for me!

Greetings va879 (aka Vannar)

Sounds to me like this shouldn't be that difficult of a fix. Obviously they have the original sound files, it seems like all somebody needs to do is reencode them with better settings and make them available for download.

That's my hope.

I play the English version of the game.

When I first started playing I was getting crackling, static, intereference in the background and many of the characters voices would go from being ok to sounding like 'demons' with slow, deep voices, like the criminals when they use a device to conceal the sound of their voice when they talk to police in films.

I know you said you'd already tried the sampling rate but I changed my sampling rate to 16 bit, 44,100 Hz (CD Quality) and the sound is fine now.

It probably won't help you as you've already messed around with the sampling rate but hopefully it may help someone who has a similar problem.

For the record I was using Steelseries Siberia V2 headphones + USB soundcard.

I digged a bit further into the files. They're X-WMA, and use a RIFF-Header. I compared the two voice files from earler: One is something related to some magic college (low quality), the other one is a completely crazy dark brotherhood dude (high quality).

The WAVEFORMATEX-header starts after the 'fmt ' in the audio file. Here are some examples:

bytes 0-1    wFormatbytes 2-3    nChannelsbytes 4-7    nSamplesPerSecbytes 8-11   nAvgBytesPerSecbytes 12-13  nBlockAlignbytes 14-15  wBitsPerSamplebytes 16-17  cbSize

I don't recall if it was encoded in Little-Endian or Big-Endian, but that should be pretty easy to find out.
I checked 'nSamplesPerSec' and 'nAvgBytesPerSec'.


Low quality file: Sample rate of 0x7D00 -> 32.000 Hz
High quality file: 0xAC44 -> 44.100 Hz

High quality file: Bytes/Sec of 0x1760 -> 6000 Bytes/Sec
Low quality file: Bytes/Sec of 0x9C4 -> 2500 Bytes/Sec

Hm, not like I'm too fond when it comes to codec and sampling rates, give me a quick summary whether what you find out is good or bad.

In conclusion you can say it's pretty bad and just confirms what I (we) have already heard in game.

The sampling rate (Hz value) describes how often a value/"snapshot" of the current audio event is taken and stored in the audio file per second (how many samples are taken). The high quality version has 44100 samples per seconds, which can be concidered as good quality and is used in many use-cases (like CD's, DVD's, a.s.o...). But the low quality version has 10900 samples less and is encoded with a lower bit rate. That's more comparable to a "good" (voip) phone call.

It's for sure because of the limited space on DVD's (XBOX360), but does it really have to affect the PC version of the game? We already have console-limited graphics, now the sound has to be limited too? I'd rather like Skyrim to take some more (mega/giga) bytes disk space than having sounds like I'm calling NPC's on my cell phone (ok, I'm boasting that up)...

So, basically we indeed need new sound files

I see, well just like I thought then.

I'd really love this to be sorted out ...

I give this thread a bump so that the bethesda-crew can read this.
I don′t think that it is a matter of consoles hardware restirction, as a xbox can handle the same dvds like a PC does. The DVD is overfilled with the Data of Skyrim anyway as you can see below:

http://www.abload.de/image.php?img=skyrimdvdl80m0.png

It′s time for a change (BD-ROM ftw )

Please fix this. I have no problem downloading a 2gig patch but i have problems hearing bad voices caused by technical issues/faulty record

Bumpadoodles.

Yep, but what now? Bethesda won't even look at this thread because they think it's just some wackos complaining about the voice actors just out of boredom.

I think either the localization agency or Bethesda themselves had a reason for this, probably because German sentences tend to be longer than their English counterparts and they had to compress it even further to fit the whole stuff on an Xbox disc.


We've shown some files are heavily compressed whereas others are not. What now?