Eric Wasylishen - 2019-12-22

This would be nice to have available, I don't have any immediate plans to implement it though.

There are a bunch of complexities to mixing Quake sound at full audio bandwidth (44+ kHz), keep in mind the vanilla game defaulted to 11kHz mixing which hides these:

  1. some of the elevator sounds that are 2 parts (lead in, looping section) don't actually loop seamlessly but have a pop. Mixing at 11kHz it's not really audible, but it's annoying at 44.1kHz
  2. clipping is common even with the default Quake mixer volume level (0.3 or something?) - e.g. Quad damage + firing the super nailgun - but again it's perceptually not too annoying when mixed at 11kHz but painful sounding at 44kHz
  3. when the game re-triggers sounds it does a hard cutoff and re-starts the sound (e.g. hold down the fire button with the super nailgun). Again the mixing at 11kHz smooths this over, but with higher sample rate you need to crossfade.

The same kind of things show up in GZDoom, there are discussions in the forums and from reading about it they added crossfading to address #3. Not sure how #2 is handled in GZDoom, there may be some built in features in OpenAL soft for this such as limiters + soft clippers? #1 is kind of an asset problem and kind of a case of #3 - crossfading the loops might be possible, but would change the length of the looping segment slightly by overlapping them.