German announcements from noir

I believe that announcements are big part of immersion especially on stopping passenger trains, so I started filling the gap in TSW with my own creations. As there is no simple way how to bring announcements into the game itself, we'll be using Soundpad, a simple tool sold for €5 on Steam, which allows us to have new keybinds in the game when running in the background.

The announcements are synthetised using TTSMaker, but I tried to follow the real announcements when possible, so you will not get only a simple list of stations, but also various local quirks and landmarks that are advertised in the trains in reality, for example "Nächste Station: Radebeul-Ost. Karl-May-Museum. Übergangsmöglichkeit zur Schmalspurbahn in Richtung Moritzburg und Radeburg."

As usual from me, take this as a first version and I will be looking forward to your feedback before I continue with the project in larger scale. While it may not seem like it, already the first pack of four routes has 533 sounds in it, so there was lot of passion invested into it already. To be able to continue produce them at such large scale, I do not currently intend to add gongs or any speaker-like filters to the files.

Included content

In first version, four routes are available: Nahverkehr Dresden, Kinzigtalbahn, Pfälzische Ludwigsbahn and Maintalbahn.

In second version, five more classic routes are available: Haupstrecke Rhein-Ruhr, München-Augsburg, Rhein-Ruhr Osten, Ruhr-Sieg Nord and SFS Köln-Aachen, each of those including destinations from both their standard and community timetables.

Installation and usage

• You will need to get Soundpad, paid but cheap tool available on Steam (you can also check the raw soundfiles in the archive before buying it).
• Unpack the provided archive somewhere (I use %steamapps%/common/Soundpad/sounds/tsw-noir/, but it shouldn't matter).
• In Soundpad, load the announcements by File - Load sound list.
• In left column pick the route and line you want to play.
• In the right column click on the first announcement from where you want to start playing them.
• At the bottom of the window you should see hotbar with few buttons for special announcements.

You may need to set the keybinds by yourself (File - Settings - Hotkeys), what I find to work best for me is:

• Num 8 for Select next file
• Num 5 for Play selected file

In addition, I use keybinds for the hotbar buttons (simply right click on the hotbar buttons and select Assign a hotkey):

• Num 4 for "Exit on the left"
• Num 6 for "Exit on the right"

These are global shortcuts, so now even without leaving TSW, you can simply on approach to station press Num 8 to move to next station, Num 5 to play the station announcement and with Num 4/6 announce on which side is the platform. Happy driving! 🙂

My other projects

Check out also my other projects that help with immersion, like Ebula-inspired book timetables or Freight train calculator. If you like my work and want to support me in continuing, you can buy me a coffee here. 🙂

Requirements

Soundpad on Steam

Play sounds in voice chats in high digital quality. Add sounds or music to your microphone signal so others will hear it, too.

Tags: announcements germany soundpad