WoWInterface - How to identify which sound is being played?

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- - How to identify which sound is being played? (https://www.wowinterface.com/forums/showthread.php?t=59792)

How to identify which sound is being played?

Is there an easier way to determine which sound was being played by the game than noting down when/where it occurred and then searching through Wowhead what could've caused the issue?

Before I stopped playing over a decade ago it was still possible to create a \Sound directory and place all the extracted sound files there, which allowed me to use Process Monitor to check which sound files were being accessed by WoW (and then subsequently mute them by replacing them with a silent .ogg/.wav), however this is not the case anymore, since WoW only seems to read the files directly from its packed \Data files nowadays.

So now we're left with the MuteSound API, which requires the IDs of the sound files. But how can we get these, without wading through Wowhead as previously mentioned?

I tried to hook the PlaySound and PlaySoundFile calls like this:

Lua Code:

hooksecurefunc("PlaySound", print)
hooksecurefunc("PlaySoundFile", print)

However this only seems to fire for a few actions, like opening your character sheet. It does not seem to fire for spells or mounts.

So is there any way to get these sound file IDS programmatically, or at least somewhat automatically?

In-game you could try Leatrix Sounds otherwise Wago.Tools

But as far as I'm aware these would just be alternatives to looking through Wowhead, it would still need to be a fully manual process (noting down, search what could've caused it).

The PlaySound API functions are for the UI (addons) section of the game to play sounds. The rest of the game sounds will be played by "internal" game engine functions not accessible by the UI API so for those, it requires a manual process.

That is unfortunate.

However I noticed that Process Monitor does capture the offset at which a compressed data file is being read, so maybe that could somehow be used with the existing CASC explorer / export tools.

Theoretically one would need to translate that offset into a file id / file name. I assume the files are stored with some sort of index, which does eventually translate into an offset, so that they can be exported by these tools. 🤔

Of course this wouldn't be an instant solution, but at least you could record some gameplay with ProcMon running and then afterwards run a compare script that matches the offsets to the packed files.

At least that's an idea in my head right now, I'm not sure if it's even possible (or if I want to dive into that, that CASC format seems pretty complex).

Code:

Time of Day  Process Name  PID    Operation  Path                                            Result    Detail

14:12:59,04  Wow.exe        24968  ReadFile    E:\Games\World of Warcraft\Data\data\data.098  SUCCESS  Offset: 496.959.488, Length: 5.308.416

14:12:59,04  Wow.exe        24968  ReadFile    E:\Games\World of Warcraft\Data\data\data.098  SUCCESS  Offset: 502.267.904, Length: 65.536

14:12:59,07  Wow.exe        24968  ReadFile    E:\Games\World of Warcraft\Data\data\data.098  SUCCESS  Offset: 309.133.312, Length: 65.536

14:12:59,07  Wow.exe        24968  ReadFile    E:\Games\World of Warcraft\Data\data\data.098  SUCCESS  Offset: 309.198.848, Length: 5.242.880

14:12:59,07  Wow.exe        24968  ReadFile    E:\Games\World of Warcraft\Data\data\data.098  SUCCESS  Offset: 314.441.728, Length: 65.536

14:12:59,10  Wow.exe        24968  ReadFile    E:\Games\World of Warcraft\Data\data\data.096  SUCCESS  Offset: 997.064.704, Length: 65.536

14:12:59,10  Wow.exe        24968  ReadFile    E:\Games\World of Warcraft\Data\data\data.096  SUCCESS  Offset: 997.130.240, Length: 3.932.160

14:12:59,10  Wow.exe        24968  ReadFile    E:\Games\World of Warcraft\Data\data\data.096  SUCCESS  Offset: 1.001.062.400, Length: 65.536

14:12:59,13  Wow.exe        24968  ReadFile    E:\Games\World of Warcraft\Data\data\data.096  SUCCESS  Offset: 562.036.736, Length: 65.536

So I was able to modify the source code of wow.export so that it would show me the used offset to export/play a sound file.

The offset being displayed there doesn't match exactly the offset recorded from Process Monitor, but it's pretty close.

For example:

Code:

WoW command

-----------------

/run PlaySoundFile(1984506)





Process Monitor

------------------

E:\Games\World of Warcraft\Data\data\data.056

Offset: 238.026.752

Length: 65.536





wow.export

-------------

Previewing sound file sound/creature/shadeweaver_zarra/vo_801_shadeweaver_zarra_04_f.ogg

fileDataID: 1984506

offset: 238047012

size: 18900





Difference

-----------

238047012-238026752= 20260 byte

Code:

WoW command

-----------------

/run PlaySoundFile(1984510)





Process Monitor

------------------

E:\Games\World of Warcraft\Data\data\data.080

Offset: 743.309.312

Length: 65.536





E:\Games\World of Warcraft\Data\data\data.080

Offset: 743.374.848

Length: 65.536





wow.export

-------------

Previewing sound file sound/creature/gunnolf_the_ferocious/vo_801_gunnolf_the_ferocious_01_m.ogg

fileDataID: 1984510

offset: 743359844

size: 32062





Difference

-----------

743359844-743309312= 50532 byte

743359844-743374848= -15004 byte

So the latter one is interesting, it recorded two entries, which are very close to each other, but none of them match the wow.export value, or the difference from the first entry.
So not sure what's going on there exactly.