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Hi!

I was able to create a new horn recording for 4 of my locomotives and thought that you might be interested in the process I took to make it work.

Mark's ADPCM tool is absolutely incredible.  He got me up and running with the application, and I wanted to share what I've learned and what I've done with the tool to create a brand new horn sound. 

In the video, I used a Proto 3 Amtrak Genesis, but I've had similar success with a 5 volt proto 2 Mikado, so anything Proto 2 and 3 should work.

The process was too much to type out, so I made this video

https://youtu.be/kQRVHTnYqtI

Of course, a big thank you to Mark for developing this!

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I’ve used his tool and some audio editing software to customize a few of my locos that had some pretty feeble sounding chuffs and whistles.

I agree it’s a great tool and kudos to Mark for developing it and making the code open source.  I think the work he has done will really help us dcs owners down the road with the closing of MTH.

P.S. Thanks for sharing your video.

Last edited by rplst8
@rplst8 posted:

I’ve used his tool and some audio editing software to customize a few of my locos that had some pretty feeble sounding chuffs and whistles.

I agree it’s a great tool and kudos to Mark for developing it and making the code open source.  I think the work he has done will really help us dcs owners down the road with the closing of MTH.

P.S. Thanks for sharing your video.

Mark definitely increased the value of MTH engines.  If Proto 3 becomes available to other manufacturers (Atlas, 3rd Rail, and Williams) once the tech company is formed, this could be a game changer since it'll allow the other manufacturers to develop sounds unique to their prototypes. 

Maybe Mark could actually get compensated for figuring all of this out and writing the program.

I agree, but some people write code as a hobby and just enjoy the challenge.  I've made contributions to a couple of open source projects over the years, and once wrote a application to read the data from a RadioShack multi-meter and then open-sourced the code.  One of the advantages of this, is that you can collaborate with others and they can contribute back to achieve more than one person could alone.

I've seen some people put up a PayPal "donate" link on their site and sometimes do quite well.  I've also donated to a few others' projects.  I would encourage Mark to do the same, I would definitely donate.

I'm actually more likely to donate to projects like this than I am to purchase commercial software because in the commercial world, the desires of the investors often drive the project to make decisions that abandon customers.  With the open-source model, someone else can continue on the work if the originator decides to do something different.  Investors and private companies are free to do as they desire of course, but customers are also free to spend their money elsewhere - or not spend it at all.  That's not to say I'm opposed entirely to commercial software.  When I find the software overwhelmingly useful and a good value, I buy it.  Like SCARM for instance, a pretty excellent value IMHO.

I'd certainly would contribute to the tool as well.  It's incredibly useful.  He had to spend a lot of time making the application.  I'm a software engineer myself and certainly understand how difficult something like this would be.  His code is rather well documented too. (I wanted to see how it worked) 

It's extremely generous of him to make the program and the source code available for free.

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