Prototypical Braking Sound For ESU LokSound

From the LokSound 5 manual: 

13.4. Adjusting the braking sound threshold

The LokSound decoder is able to play a wheel-synchron brake sound. To play a brake sound, there are several conditions necessary:

• The braking time in CV 4 is set sufficiently high (at least value 20 or higher
• The loco drives with high speed at the time of the braking command
• The loco receives the driving command “Speed step 0” 

The LokSound decoder will now start to play the braking sound at the time determined in CV 64. The higher the value in CV 64 is, the sooner the braking sound will be played. The default value 100 is approximately equivalent to speed step 48 of 128. The braking sound should stop when the loco stops. You are able to do some “fine-tuning” with CV 65, if the loco stops too early.

CVs 64 & 65
What are the values of CV64 and CV65? CV64 determines the speed when the squeal comes on and CV65 determines the lower speed when it should turn off. It defaults to 20 and 1 respectively in many (if not all) of the sound files. The "Loco drives with high speed" statement just means that the starting speed has to be higher than the value in CV64 for the squeal to start. A low value in CV64, say around 10 and a value around 3 in CV65, on a scale of 1 to 255, sounds prototypical (to the author anyway). This also cuts down on the amount of squealing going on. Of course, set these to the values you prefer.

One additional point to consider is you do not want a loco’s brakes to squeal if it is just coasting to a stop without brakes. To accomplish this add a duplicate line for the original F8 but this time add the condition "not F10" to the conditions column and "Disable brake sound" in the Logical Function column. The result is that the squeal is heard only if the brake F10 is applied. See fig 1.

Fig 1 Adding not F10 and Disable brake sound

Automatic (Train) Brake

A side effect of adding the additional line shown in fig 1 is that if you have implemented the automatic (train) brake (the author explains how to implement it in this article utilizing F12), the brake squeal will be suppressed when you apply it. Some may consider this as nice but it’s not prototypical. To turn on brake squeal for the automatic brake once you have implemented the “Disable brake sound”, add the condition “not F12” to the duplicate line added above. See Fig. 2.

Fig 2 Adding not F12

All of the above implies you are using F8 for drive, F10 for the independent brake and F12 for the train brake. Change things accordingly if you are using different functions.

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