Overview
Sonomagy is a resource pack that aims to overhaul the sound design for Thaumcraft 4, 5 and 6. Not in terms of remaking the sounds entirely anew, but instead by recreating the originals with higher fidelity, resulting in an enhanced audiological© experience.
Thaumcraft has always had well selected sound effects, but the actual quality of the audio tends to be rather poor, with low sample rates, garbling and compression artifacts. This was done to reduce filesizes, but this has the unfortunate side-effect of making the sounds feel somewhat unimpressive or strangely muffled.
However, by going through the agonisingly tedious process of sound effect hunting on suspect websites, I’ve found the original versions of these sound effects, and from there I’ve located and mixed higher-quality versions of them. No longer will stunning arcane events sound like they’re coming down a telephone line, now the magic will sound truly magical!
Demo
While I can sit here and type away all day trying to explain this resource pack, showing almost always outdoes telling. As such, please refer to the video below, which showcases a few select examples of the original sounds followed by my improvements:
Reviews
But wait, you can’t trust any old link on some website where you can download all manner of Minecraft-modding-related monstrosities! Nor can you trust the video I’ve just made! Or the fact that downloads are usually checked thoroughly by moderators on the site! Or… something else like that! I mean, unless this pack has made its way onto ‘dodgymcdownloads.ru’ or something, then in which case: it’s your own fault if you get a virus.
Still, you’ll need to see what others have said about the pack first, so you can blindly put your faith in the opinions of people you’ve never met in person, won’t you? Well, the rave reviews are in, featuring some of your favourite modders! And some of your unfavourite modders whom you’ve probably never even heard of before:
“I didn't know I wanted this till u showed me” – EpicSquid, Calamari Scented Mystic Mods Dev.
“:0 it's really good, it's really good to see others people than codder [sic] working on mods , it's really imserive [sic] and more clean [sic], i really like it” – Wind_Blade, Thaumcraft Addon Dev.
“I love it” – Voxel_Friend, Rustic Thaumaturgy Dev and volumetric associate to no-one in particular.
"I always appreciate listening to some good jar sounds while jumping all over them" – TheCodex6824, Thaumic Augmentation Dev, Pixel Art Connoisseur and Telepathic Idea Thief.
"you never really notice the compression until you hear it clean and now i can't go back" – Kat, aka 5B, who is most certainly not a type of pencil.
"sonomagy seems cool" – CursedFlames, whose invigorating prose can inspire downtrodden armies to fight, whose literary genius can bring bedridden victims of illness back to full health, and whose incredible way with the English language can help me get more people to download Sonomagy.
"I didn't notice any significant difference, that's a no from me." – LordFokas, casting his vote on whether to add Sonomagy to a modpack. He is not a real Lord, however, and thus he was not able to lobby the modpack creators into making sure it was not added.
“They sound great! […] but […] Not everyone may want to the extra size & memory they will use. Thanks for the effort though” – Azanor, Thaumcraft Creator. And they aren’t that large…
Final Notes
This pack is now probably only going to be updated extremely irregularly due to the difficulty in finding sound sources. However, I have created a spreadsheet documenting where I found the original sources for the sounds in this pack, as well as partially found sounds and other bits and bobs of research. It may be useful for those still making Thaumcraft related content, or it may simply be interesting to you, so you can find that here.
Thank you to everyone who has downloaded and enjoyed this pack.