Jingles are a type of user generated content (UGC) which allows players to play a short sound which emanates from their in-game player. These sounds can be created by the player. Players must manually opt-in to enable jingles.
Jingles must be manually enabled using the following commands:
cl_customsounds 1 // Enable jingles
tf_delete_temp_files 0 // Prevent the game from deleting the cached jingles.
cl_allowdownload 1 // Allow downloads from the server, including jingles.
cl_allowupload 1 // Allow uploading files (jingles) to the server.
cl_downloadfilter all // Ensure jingles aren't filtered out of the allowed downloads.
Jingles cannot be used on a server running with sv_pure >= 1 because this disables transferring of the jingle files. Jingles which a player has already downloaded and cached from elsewhere will still be usable on sv_pure >= 1 servers.
These commands can be entered into the in-game console, or by adding them to autoexec.cfg. This file is located at steamapps/common/Team Fortress 2/tf/cfg/ for TF2, and other Valve games will be in the same general location.
How to enable the developer console in TF2. The steps are similar for other Valve games.
{{TODO: Instructions}}
On Linux, the file name of a jingle must not contain any capital letters as it will fail to load. {{TODO: Confirm this is true}}
The maximum file size of a jingle is 512 KiB or 524,288 bytes. This limit is hard-coded into the game client and cannot be modified by server plugins.
Depending on the length of the sound, it may be beneficial to downsample the audio to mono, use ADPCM compression, and/or lower the bitrate to fit within the required file size limit.
A standard jingle will play when the player uses the jingle command and conclude at the end of the audio clip.
A looping jingle can loop or jump to and from any point within itself to any other point, allowing for more creative uses.
To use a jingle, the .wav file should be saved somewhere in the custom directory, such as tf/custom/myjingles/sound/player/radio.wav, then the following commands entered into the console:
bind j "impulse 202" // Bind the J key to play the audio file
cl_soundfile radio.wav // Select which file to play
Jingles are affected by items which use the voice pitch scale and SPELL: Halloween voice modulation attributes such as Halloween items. {{TODO: Can Jingle length be extended without losing too much quality by making use of pitch shifting?}}