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How to Play Custom Sounds in TF2
By Mr. Underscore
Think sprays are the best thing ever? Well, they're not, but don't worry about that. Did you know you can play custom SOUNDS in TF2? You can! No joke! Just a few asterisks.
   
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Created by
Mr. Underscore
Offline
Category: Modding or Configuration
Languages: English
Posted
Updated
15 Mar, 2014 @ 2:38pm
25 Jun, 2022 @ 7:00am
2,927 Unique Visitors
27 Current Favorites
Guide Index
Overview
First and Only Section 
Comments
First and Only Section
NOTE: This guide is very old, and dates from an era when Valve allowed more custom content on servers. Your results may vary. Your best shot at getting it to work in the modern day is on an unofficial server.

This guide assumes you know how to edit your autoexec.cfg file. Go look that up if you don't know how. Otherwise, read on. It's just a quickie guide.

First, there are a few commands you need to know:
cl_customsounds 1 - enables the playing and hearing of custom sounds
cl_customsounds 0 - disables custom sounds
impulse 202 - plays mono wav file specified by cl_soundfile
cl_soundfile "filename.wav" - specifies mono wav file in "tf" folder
bind "key" [command] - causes a command to be executed with the press of a single key

If you know anything about configuring TF2, you're probably already able to figure out the rest. For those of you who just like to copy and paste, here's what my autoexec file looks like.

//Custom sounds
cl_customsounds 1
cl_soundfile annoyingsound.wav
bind SEMICOLON impulse 202

Thus, whenever I press ";" in-game, the game will search for a MONO MIX file called "annoyingsound.wav" in .../Steam/steamapps/common/TeamFortress 2/tf and play it. It will ONLY be heard by players with cl_customsounds set to 1 (the default is 0).

The impulse command is the same command used to spray sprays, and doing this uses the same cooldown timer as putting up sprays. So you can only do EITHER it OR put up a spray every 10 seconds or so.

Anyway, yeah, get all your friends to put "cl_customsounds 1" in their autoexec files.
7 Comments
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♥ poopoo 7 Jun, 2021 @ 11:37am 
i didn’t realize this guide was from 2014, oops.
BongRippa'88 7 Jun, 2021 @ 11:11am 
I could be doing it wrong, but it doesn't seem to work on the menu.

I was going to use it for a music panel on my hud but there is a different way that I'll try. It shouldn't be too hard.
Mr. Underscore  [author] 6 Jun, 2021 @ 9:25am 
Haven't tried this in a long time. Someone needs to check if it works on *Community* servers.
Obviously, Valve banned most custom content from official servers other than hitsounds, so this won't work there.
Saint Hamudi(RPD pls) 30 Apr, 2021 @ 11:13am 
Not working anymore. Best option is buy Soundpad
♥ poopoo 29 Mar, 2021 @ 10:57am 
does this still work?
catking00 10 Jun, 2014 @ 7:10pm 
Short sweet and to the point. Very nice, My only complaint would be for the people who DON'T know how to do that stuff. Saying "google it" doesn't always work and can sometimes give people misinformation.
That Wun Wabbit 14 Apr, 2014 @ 9:12pm 
+rep
Learned something new from reading this