CRACKSHOT

real recordings · sliced, measured, shaped · no generated audio

real recordingsno generated audioCC0 / CC BY

I was looking for a really good pistol shot for a game I'm working on, and ended up building a small workshop around it. It hunts through real, openly licensed gunshot recordings, slices them into single shots, measures each one, scores how well it suits a snappy, punchy game pistol, and then shapes the best ones to be crisp and crunchy. Everything is classic signal processing. Nothing here is generated by an audio-generating model.

Turn your volume down a little: these are gunshots, and some of them are sharp.

Fire the set

Eight different shots, level-matched, rotating like a game would: crisp, crunchy and "arc" (crisp with a pitched-down sci-fi sweetener) from eight different real guns. Hit fire and hold Space, or tap rapidly.

Rate 4/sVolume

The shot browser

Every single shot sliced out of the recordings, ranked by suitability. Click a row to hear the raw shot against its crisp, crunchy and arc versions, and to see exactly why it scored what it did.

Score	Gun	Mic	Crisp	Crunch	Attack	Tail	Room

Pick a shot on the left.

Feel it: crisp, crunch and weight

A live version of the idea. These sliders run a quick processing chain on whichever shot is selected so you can hear what each ingredient does. (The files you download were made by the careful offline chain, which also tames the tail and shapes the attack; this is a sketch for your ears.)

Crisp 0 Crunch 0 Weight 0

Select a shot first.

How it's judged

The score is a plain checklist, not a mystery. You can read it, disagree with it and change it.

What "crisp" and "crunchy" mean here

Crisp is a clear, bright, quick transient: it speaks instantly, has a strong 2 to 6 kHz "crack", and doesn't smear. Crunchy is texture: dense, gritty harmonics in the 1 to 8 kHz range, the thing saturation adds, so the shot has teeth and not just a click. The numbers on this page are proxies for what you hear: crisp comes from brightness, attack and tail; crunch comes from how squashed the peak is (crest factor, kurtosis) and how dense the spectrum is.

The suitability score (0 to 100) and its checklist

Attack (14): how fast it reaches full volume. Under 1.6 ms is ideal.
Tail (11): time to fall 50 dB. 140 to 480 ms is right for a game pistol.
Dry (14): how little room echo is in the first half second. The game adds its own space.
Clipping (13): any shot where the recorder distorted is penalised hard.
Clean (7): the noise floor under the shot.
Crack (14): the share of energy in the 2 to 6 kHz band.
Body (10) and Weight (8): how much low end there is, so it feels like a gun and not a clap.
Bright (9): spectral centre between about 1.5 and 4.8 kHz.

How the shots are shaped

Tail control: an extra fade after 70 to 80 ms dries out the room.
Transient shaping: where a fast envelope runs ahead of a slow one, a little gain (up to about +6 dB) sharpens the first few milliseconds.
Crisp: a harmonic exciter on the 3.5 kHz+ band plus presence EQ.
Crunch: parallel saturation on 250 Hz to 7 kHz plus a touch of sample-and-hold grit, with the top end kept bright.
Weight: a short, plain sine "thump" falling from about 130 to 58 Hz, generated by code, mixed low so it supports the shot without slowing the attack.
Arc: the crisp version with a pitched-down, high-passed whisper of a sci-fi sound from Kenney's CC0 pack (the same pack the Sonic Smithy uses).

Match a sound you like (private, runs on your machine)

If there's a pistol sound you want to get close to, record a short clip of it for your own reference and run python tools/match_reference.py yourclip.wav. It measures your clip the same way and lists which shots here are nearest. Nothing is uploaded and your clip is never copied into the pack. My target profile (a punchy, bright, dry, short pistol) is an approximation; a real reference replaces my guess with your ear.

Credits and licences

All the raw audio is from real recordings by other people, shared openly. Thank you to them.

The licence note on one source

The "Gunshot Sounds" pack on OpenGameArt is labelled CC0 on its page, but the text bundled inside the download says Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 (Vincent Sevedge, 2009). To be safe, any shot from it (the CZ-52) is credited under CC BY 3.0 here. None of its shots were good enough to make the pack picks anyway.

Download

crackshot-pack.zip

Contains the 8 round-robin shots, every crisp / crunch / arc variant of the 14 pack picks (48 kHz, 16-bit mono WAV), the raw slices, LICENSES.txt and the tools to reproduce it. The tools need Python with numpy, scipy and soundfile.