Anybody have trouble making .ogg horns or engine sounds? I sure did and I also figured out how to make it work. Now I'll share this with you.

It's easier to make .wav audio files work with your skins, but you really should not use them. These audio files are uncompressed and take a lot of space. This is bad, because skin files are downloaded from internet and bigger the file, longer the download time. Half of the fun is that other players hear your horn and see your beautiful skin.

I have 8 seconds long audio file on my computer, which is 2.6 mb as .wav and 113 kb as .ogg. See the difference? That's why you should always use ogg-files instead. OK, .wav gets compressed when you put it to the .zip archive, but there's a little problem: there's nothing much to compress in .wav files. The example .wav file was 2.4 mb when compressed.

There's couple tricks you need to know before you can make .ogg work with Trackmania and the biggest problem is amount of channels in the audio file. Trackmania requires skin audio files to be mono-channel. Many programs can export to .ogg, but few can make them mono. For example, Audacity always overrides your settings and exports .ogg in stereo. This is bad and many programs do the same.

Here's step-by-step instructions for creating ogg vorbis-files which work with your Trackmania skins. All programs below are downloadable free of charge from internet.

1. Download and install dbpoweramp cd ripper and audio converter >>> http://www.dbpoweramp.com/download.htm

2. Download and install ogg vorbis-codec for dbpoweramp >>> http://www.dbpoweramp.com/codec-central.htm

3.Download and install Audacity >>> http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

4. Use Audacity to edit your audio file and to change it's volume level. Maximum length of the file is 10 seconds.

5. When it's ready, export it as horn .wav

6. Then go to the directory where your .wav audio file was saved and right click on it. If you installed dbpoweramp correctly, you will see option: "Convert to". Choose it.

8. Now you will see prompt for convert options. Set as following:
- Converting to: Ogg Vorbis
- Target: Quality (VBR). Below this you see slider control. It sets the amount of compression. Good setting is somewhere in the middle of the scale. Value around 0.2 - 0.3 are good. But this really is dependent on the nature of the audio in file. Remember that you should always compromise between quality and filesize.
- Frequency: 44,1khz
- Channels: 1 'mono'

9. Click the "Convert" - button. When the file has been converted, include your just created horn.ogg-file to your skins .zip-archive.

10. Start the game and enjoy your new horn

So in nutshell:

-Mono Channel
-44khz max
-10 seconds max
-use .ogg files
-use dbpoweramp to convert to .ogg

Hope this helps somebody!!

Got this PM from dinf. Seems that Audacity got upgraded, since I tried it on previous version and it didn't work (or I'm idiot )
So, you might need 1.3 version of Audacity to do it this way. I might fix the tutorial too when I have time to test this myself