Description
Zounds is a chat sound triggering utility
Zounds lets players "say" funny movie/music clips to each other in their chat texts. Think audio emoticons. Sound files are played when Zounds sees registered trigger words in any chat messages. All channels and message types monitored. Originally created for Unreal Tournament 2004, the hysterical sound collections have grown over the years to include now over 1,300 triggers!
INSTALL THE SOUND PACKS BELOW
Sound files are packaged as separate addons for speed of updating when changes are made to the Zounds engine. You must install the core sample libraries to begin hearing zounds:
How To Use
Zounds are played simply by typing the triggers into your chat text. Anyone else with Zounds who sees that chat channel will hear the triggers. Examples:
- bblol - the Beavis & Butthead laugh
- nooo - Darth Vader's anguished "NOOOOOOOO"
- gameover - Hudson freaking out in Aliens - "Game over man, Game Over!"
- uwannago - Team America - "Oh Yeah? You wanna go??"
- w00t - famous hip hop music clip
To play triggers, Zounds can be configured to require a slash "/" prefix before trigger names or not. When the slash prefix is required, you'll only hear Zounds when players purposefully trigger them (i.e.: "/lol"). When no prefix is required, Zounds will play "passively" when encountering any regular instance of the trigger name (i.e.: "lol"). Prefix your triggers with a slash to be sure that they're always heard.
For example: "Dude I just got pushed off lumber mill! /notgood /splat" works the same as "Dude notgood I just got pushed off lumber mill! splat!" with no prefix required. Note: Zounds are case sensitive. As shown here, chat messages can contain multiple zounds.
When using a "/" to trigger a zound by chat message or macro, keep in mind that the / character cannot be the first letter of a chat message or else WoW thinks you are using a slash command (e.g. "/invite"). To trigger a zound, just add a space before the slash like " /bravo".
In addition to funny quotes, the Zounds core library has cartoon sound effects, screams, yells, comical insults, beeps, dings, and music clips.
Features
- Option to allow active or passive zounds
- Can choose what channels and message types to monitor
- Trigger color coding in chat
- Multiple sounds per trigger
- Anti-spamming sound cool downs
- Global and individual trigger mute
Spam and Cooldowns
Zounds will only play a new sound once every 3 seconds to allow multiple triggers to be used while still allowing some degree of overlap, especially if a longer zound is currently being played. While on this 3 second cooldown, new sounds being triggered go into a queue. The maximum queue size is 10 triggers. Zounds triggered when the queue is full are ignored.
Both the cooldown delay and queue size are configurable on the options screen.
If a player is continually spamming zounds while staying under the queue limit, simply type "/ignore [name]" to solve the problem.
Multiple Sounds Per Trigger
Repetitiveness of common triggers (i.e. "welcome") is reduced by registering multiple sound files for the same trigger name. If there is more than one sound for a particular trigger, Zounds will play the files in a repeating sequence based on the order in which they were registered. For example, the default corepacks come with 8 different welcomes for the trigger name "welcome".
Zounds Can Be Used to Make Your Own Sound Packs
For those addon developers out there, you can use the global function: registerZound(triggername, pathtosound) in your LUA code to load your own custom sound files.
registerZound("AGAIN", "Interface\\AddOns\\Zounds_Corepack1\\Samples\\AGAIN.ogg");
Don't forget the double backslashes in the path!
Sound File Specifications
Audio files must be in the form of MP3 or OGG. To keep sizes down, around 10Hz MONO sampling is sufficient. You probably should not go above 20Hz as its unnecessary.
Zounds should be short and pithy! The average length is 5 seconds. Go above 10 seconds and you risk that people will MUTE it because long Zounds can be annoying when played too much. Short Zounds are always funny. Once you start making these things, you'll begin to hear potential Zounds everywhere. Including every quote imaginable probably isn't a good idea either; the best Zounds are situational. For example, lets say your team is getting owned in a BG. "gameover" is a funny way to vent your frustration. If there is no reason why a particular Zound would ever be played, then don't include it. This is harder to do than it sounds (no pun intended).
Enjoy!