X-Plane/Sounds in X Plane

Airplanes have noises associated with them of course, and X-Plane (XP) allows the airplane designer to customize the sounds associated with his or her plane. The following will attempt to explain how this is done within XP.

Last Edited - 01/03/07

Current Stable XP release - 8.50 (as of this date 8.60 beta 8 is out)

I am: Terry Ginelli, "twgin" on x_plane.org. Any corrections, comments, hints, anything at all on this topic please PM me on the org. Alternatively, please feel free to edit this Wiki page. It is my hope that perhaps the community will take more advantage of this type of resource; I believe that we as XP airplane designers are constantly reinventing the wheel and this might save us all a bit of time and trouble.

Default sounds: Within your main XP folder is another folder named "Resources". Inside are folders such as Earth Nav Data, default scenery, plugins, preferences, and "sounds". Inside the sounds folder are six other folders named:

Alert Contact Engine Systems Weather Radio Chatter

Each of these folders contains a collection of .wav files (.wav describes a fairly common type of audio file usable by both Macs and PCs). The titles of the folders are somewhat self explanatory:

Alert contains messages such as a voice saying "200 feet". If your aircraft has instrumentation that warns the pilot as the plane descends through 200 feet, XP wil play this message.

Contact contains sounds associated with the airplane interacting with ground. Crash sounds, rolling on the runway, tire skid upon touchdown, etc.

Engine contains generic sounds for piston, turbine, jet engines etc.

Systems contains sounds for flaps, gear, avionics, APU, etc.

Weather contains sounds for rain hitting the windshield, snow, wind, etc.

Radio Chatter contains tower to plane communications and so on. Radio chatter can be turned on or off in XP; under "Settings" choose "Sounds..." and turn radio chatter on or off.

If your airplane has no custom sound information these sounds are going to be used by XP when your plane is loaded. They're not bad, but they are limited and custom sounds go a long way to enhancing your airplane's "realism" in the sim.

The rest of this document will focus on how to use custom sounds for your aircraft.

First a note on copyrights. I am not an expert or even knowledgeable in this area, so please assign the proper value to these comments. As we all do these days, the first place you will look for sounds is the internet, and there are lots of sounds out there. Some authors place restrictions on their copyrighted work (as is their right) and some don't. Some just ask for attribution, i.e. if you use their stuff you have to give them credit in a written description of your aircraft. Most do not want their work to be used in for profit activities. X-Plane.org is (rightfully) very strict on this issue. As a aircraft designer, you should err on the side of caution; include a text file description of your aircraft in the aircraft file and credit everyone appropriately. If the work is copyrighted and has restrictions, just look elsewhere for appropriate sounds. Its a small thing and its easy to cheat; do the right thing.

When you design an airplane in XP or download one that someone else has posted, inside the main folder are folders such as "airfoils" or "objects" or "weapons". There might also be a folder called "sounds", inside of which will be subfolders exactly the same as the Sounds folder discussed above. If this folder/subfolders exists in your aircraft folder XP will use the contents instead of the default sounds in the resources folder.

So, if you want to use custom sounds for an aircraft, create the folder called "sounds" inside your main airfraft folder and within "sounds" create the subfolders "alert" "contact" "engine" "systems" "weather" and "radio chatter". You don't have to use all of these; you could create only the subfolder "engine" for instance. XP would use default sounds for everything except for the .wav files you have placed into your "engine" sub folder.

On an fairly advanced airplane you might typically find all of the subfolders except for "radio chatter". As this is being written, .org member "wendygirl" has posted radio chatter files based in Japan as opposed to major U.S. cities; substituting these .wav files for the originals will make XP flying in Japan's airspace a bit more realistic. Wendygirl's files are intended for XP users who might want to replace the default radio chatter: the point here is that whatever you put into the custom sound subfolders will be used by XP; if in your "alert" folder you replace the "200 ft" message with "oopsie daisy" this is what XP will play when your plane descends through 200 feet.