Sound Sprays (or Spray Sounds, etc.) are little bits of audio that can be played when a bind is pressed, however, they function just like sprays. They upload themselves from the client to the server, just like a spray, but as an audible "Wav" format. This little but cool feature was added somewhere in 2011, sort of hid under the rug by Valve, then it was broken by the steampipe update for some time, then it was patched and functional again.

Just like sprays, Sound Sprays have a cool down time to prevent spam, and can only be played when you are alive. This cool little feature is heavily underlooked by the community, now coming in alternative forms of plug-ins and HLDJ, however, since it is an official feature, sv_pure 1 based servers like official Valve servers allow it, but any server with sv_pure 2 do not.

So how do you work it? Lemme show you!

Sound Sprays can be anything you want, as long as it's not too long and at a 44100 (higher quality, takes a bit more space) or 22050 (lower quality, takes a bit less space) sample rate of course. All that can be configured in an audio editing program named Audacity. Once you're done with that, you're gonna export it to

Steam\steamapps\common\Team Fortress 2\tf\custom\*Any name you want*\sound\player
and name it "Jingle.wav"

Your sound has to be under 512kb for this to work.

This is the hardest, but an easy part. Configuring the console, which can be done through a config file known as "autoexec." If you don't have one, just create a new text file, name it "autoexec.cfg", and put it in:

Steam\steamapps\common\Team Fortress 2\tf\cfg

Make sure it's file extension is ".cfg". Then you can open it with any text editing program like Notepad. Then you will copy and paste these commands into it:

cl_customsounds "1"
cl_soundfile "sound/player/jingle.wav"
bind "*any key here*" "impulse 202"
cl_allowupload 1

Then join a server, hit the key, and your sound should play!

The problem is that other players have to have the command "cl_customsounds 1" enabled in order to hear other people's sounds, which is disabled by default. It doesn't appear in the settings either, and the procedure is really easy, yet so obscure. Not to mention Valve IS aware of it, however, they support it indirectly and hardly touch it. So that's why I want this signal boosted, it's a pretty cool and fun feature that Valve should really emphasize on, let them know the stuff we want to share through sounds!

So there you have it, happy speaking!