iRacersResource -

Sound Waves, an interview with the creator of the Jimmie Johnson spotter pack.

This is the first, in what I hope, will be many special features here at iRacers Resource. We hope to bring you interviews, tutorials, tips and tricks and more. To get you these features we are looking among you for writers and contributors. If you feel that you have a finger on the pulse of the iRacing community, are willing to educate or have something to say please contact us for opportunities.

For the first of these special features we dive into the mind of Dave Hoffman, the creator of the well used and well loved Jimmie Johnson spotter packs.

iRacers Resource: Your spotter pack first surfaced in 2003. What made you decide to create your own spotter pack?

Dave Hoffman: Little known fact, I actually started dabbling in 2001. I made a horrible "Days of Thunder" spotter/cc pack for NASCAR Racing 4, just to see if it could be done. I eventually moved it over to NASCAR Racing 2002, and posted it on my old AOL webpage. It redefined the word “awful,” but it taught me a lot of invaluable lessons when working on the Jimmie Johnson spotter/cc project. I created the JJ pack for a few reasons. 1) I thought that the default spotter was very lacking, and didn't sound believable. 2) I thought that a more realistic sounding package could really jack the immersion factor to new heights. 3) The spotter, in general, was pretty much ignored by the modding community, so I figured I’d take a stab at filling that void. However, after my Days of Thunder pack efforts, I had my doubts that I could make one that would be any good.

iRR: Once you got started how did it evolve? Give us a brief history.

DH: The beginning was easy. Starting with nothing, everything that I captured from a race went right into the pack. That was a good and bad thing, but at that point, beggars can't be choosers.

I knew it was going to take a while to complete it, so I decided to release it in stages just to get it out there. With a mixture of the defaults, plus many poor quality real clips, it sounded like a really bad hack job, honestly. But after almost every race, I’d update it with new or improved clips, and little by little, the number of defaults grew less and less, and the real clips got better and more plentiful within the pack.

As my inventory of files grew, I started getting creative with what was said; sometimes creating sentences from several different clips, and it took off from there. The more sound you get, the easier it gets.

iRR: With the way iRacing controls their product, were you surprised they were going to let people create their own spotter packs?

DH: Yes and no. I know that they wanted to keep the playing field equal for everyone (hence, no audio sliders for example), but I’ve always thought that the spotter is a neutral component ... kind of irrelevant. So I thought that it was something that they would quietly allow. I was very surprised; however, that they ended up encouraging people to make sound packs, gave instructions, and even made it easy to switch them in and out. I wasn’t expecting that.

iRR: Is the spotter pack your creating for iRacing new material or reused files from N2003 days?

DH: There is some new stuff in there, but right now the majority of the pack is from the NR03 project. My goal from the beginning was to have most of the iRacing pack be new stuff, with some carryover of my favorite NR03 clips, or to fill any holes. iRacing has more or less coded the essentials in there at this point, which doesn’t leave many places to put in much of the new stuff yet. I could always switch out an old “outside” with a new “outside,” but I don’t think anyone would notice :)

iRR: What made you decide on using Chad Knaus and Chris Osborne? How do you go about capturing their voices?

DH: When I started the project, I actually disliked Jimmie Johnson as a driver. I think it was his 2nd season in Cup, and I was tired of seeing his dang car running in the lead pack all the time. So I was among the many thousands hoping that he’d safely wreck out every week. (Sorry, Jimmie, just being honest).

But the spotter pack is over 500 files so I needed a lot of sound. I wanted to create this thing using one team rather than a spotter collage, and at the time, there were only 10 radios to pick from. I think I started making a Kevin Harvick pack, or a Dale Jr. pack, but they weren’t talking nearly enough for me to get this thing finished in under 10 years. Meanwhile, whenever I stopped on the #48 radio, they were always talking. They wouldn’t shut up. So with great reluctance, I settled on the #48 because I thought it would make doing the project easier and faster.

While listening every week, I ended up gaining a great deal of respect for Jimmie and Chad. Just from how hard they worked, and how cohesively they communicated. He became my favorite driver somewhere along the way.

I record the audio using a simple audio editor on the PC, while listening to the in-car radio on a website that shouldn’t be too hard to figure out. ;)

iRR: I'm sure some of the other spotter pack creator are curious what software and processes you use to create your pack. If it's not a secret can you give us a brief description?

DH: I record everything using Goldwave at 22050Hz, 8-bit mono. I have a Creative X-Fi card, so I also use Creative’s mixer to record-in some added treble. Unfortunately, the tone of the source audio usually has some muffle to it, so I like to try to filter out any muffled audio from the get go. I then open the raw clips in Creative WaveStudio and use the “Remove Silence” filter to leave me nothing but dialog, then I go back into Goldwave to finish it off.

After I crop out clips that I think I could use now, or in the future, I’ll throw some other filters on the clip if I need some more treble, or more amplitude, or whatever. I keep a control clip open for comparison, just to make sure the new stuff has the same tone, or volume as the current stuff. Clips often get pieced together to form a sentence in the sim, so if you can’t tell when that’s happening, I’ve done my job.

Last step is to resample the clip into the sim-required 5512Hz, 8-bit mono format, and it’s ready to go.

iRR: On your website you mentioned how you like the incremental updates to the spotter system in iRacing. What would you like to see added next?

DH: More flexibility. If they’re going to pattern the spotter using NR03’s model, there’s room in there to get a little creative, but you’re still limited. I have a lot of things that I would love to put into the package, but there’s no place for it, and if there is, there’s one option. Like “Top10,” for example. I could put 100 different things in there, but we’re limited to 1.

The new fuel-related utterances in iRacing are a little more open. When you have 5 laps of gas left in the tank, there are 3 files associated with that event, and the sim will randomly trigger one of them to play. If I had my way, I would do the same with every single event trigger, and I wouldn’t limit it. If I wanted to have 50 files associated with having 5 laps of gas left, I could, and it would randomly pick one of them to play.

If that were the case, in the end, I’d have so many files in there for everything that no race would ever sound remotely the same as the last one. You never want to know what’s going to be said before it’s said, as it dulls the immersion factor. So spotter packs could sound a lot more realistic if those shackles were removed.

iRR: Other then sound what feature would you most like to see in iRacing?

DH: Definitely dynamic environments... IE- weather and track conditions. Many times in real-world racing, teams get lucky and hit on a setup, or find something on the track, while a dominating car from the spring race is garbage in the fall race. I would love for that dynamic to become part of iRacing and make things less static. The same setup shouldn’t always work like a charm, and even the best drivers should struggle sometimes.

iRR: What is your current favorite feature in iRacing?

DH: So many different ways to go with that, I can’t even pick one. Generally speaking, and I wouldn’t have said this a year or two ago, but I’d say that my favorite feature is the SR system because it has an effect on everything. I think it keeps everyone mindful of being clean. If that makes most people think twice about trying some low percentage move, it works. Combined with the licensing tiers, I think the racing is better because of it. After all, if the races resembled something for an old Sierra open server, everything at iRacing would be a lot less appealing.

iRR: What are you currently working on now for improvements of your spotter pack and what things would you like to fix or add in the future?

DH: I’ve mainly just been collecting audio and keeping my options open for whatever direction iRacing heads next. I’ve collected a mountain of sound to pick from, so I should be in good shape.

There are still a number of clips that I don’t really like the quality of, but the situations which brought on the original dialog doesn’t happen often, so I’ve never been able to get anything better, or even relevant. That bugs me whenever I hear it. There are also a number of events where I’m forced to use the same generic clips out of necessity. I’d really love to get good, unique clips for those kinds of things. Ultimately, I just keep trying to make it better in whatever way that I can.

View Spotter Pack Here