One thing EA Sports really keeps touting in NCAA Football 09 is the college football atmosphere. And why not? It is one of the big things that separates the college game from the NFL. This year EA has implemented a new custom sound feature. You can use your own personal collection of music and sound effects to set up your own custom in-game atmosphere. There are over 20 different situations you are able to customize.
- Successful Field Goal
- Successful PAT
- Successful 2 pt Conversion
- TD
- Safety
- Defense on 3rd down
- Defense on 4th down
- Kickoff
- Timeout called by home team
- Timeout called by away team
- Tackle for loss or sack
- Defensive stop on 3rd down
- Defensive stop on 4th down
- Turnover
- Defense takes the field after a kick return
- 3rd down conversion successful
- 4th down conversion successful
- 1st down conversion on 1st or 2nd down
- FG missed by opponent
- Booth review
- Start of the 4th quarter
- Penalty on Away team
Some may ask how this feature works. It may not be the most user friendly feature, but not the hardest thing to figure out either. There are two different ways to use custom sounds in NCAA Football 09. First, you can stream playlists directly from a computer on your network. I wouldn’t really recommend doing this as I’ve noticed there is a delay in actually playing the sound. For example, I set up a Purdue fight song to play when scoring a touchdown. The sound wouldn’t actually play until kickoff was about to start, thus allowing it to play for two seconds.
The other way to utilize this feature, and the way I would recommend, is to burn whatever sounds you want to a CD, and then rip that CD to your 360/PS3 hard drive. I copied a few sounds over to the XBOX 360 and created individual playlists for each track. For example, I created a playlist specifically for one Purdue chant, and that was the only track on the list. After creating a few playlists with one sound/track on it, I put in NCAA Football and went to Custom Sounds Menu. From there I created a new sound, picked the situation, and then picked the playlist. I then went into the game to do some testing. Success! The sound played on time with no delay. Although this feature isn’t probably the easiest feature to use, it still is a nice addition to the game. If you’re looking for added realism then you’ll love it. I was hoping this feature would be similar to the Stadium Sounds feature in the 2K Sports titles, but it still is a nice addition.
If you have any questions or comments stop by our new NCAA Football Stadium Sounds Forum. Here you can also find tips on how to create custom sounds, programs to use, and share sounds with your fellow forum members.
Other Tidbits and Tips about the Feature:
- You are allowed 50 slots for custom sounds. After that you must replace sounds to make room.
- Sound clips will play 60 seconds or until the situation you selected to play the sound is over.
- You can have sounds specific to teams, or it has an “All” option to cover all teams in the game.
- I would recommend downloading a free recorder to get sounds streamed in videos off Youtube. I had trouble finding mp3 or wav files, but was able to find a slew of videos featuring college football sounds.
- I mentioned in the forum that if you stream music it doesn’t sound authentic. You are playing in a stadium but the music being played is CD quality. Some have suggested using an mp3 editor to edit the sound to make it sound like it is being played over a PA system. Most sound editing software has this.
- You will probably also want to use a sound editor to cut your sounds down to specific segments you want played.
- Remember the key is to make playlists for individual soundbites. I’ve noticed if you have more than one sound on a playlist it doesn’t play at random.
