[Non-Official] Feedback request for Audio?

Hi to all,

It would be great to have an opportunity to give feedback on the new audio APIs.

A lot of great stuff in there, but also many interrogations, especially when it comes to interacting with the new mixer and audio group assets at runtime.

I'll shoot away:

Positive
- Very polished already, nicely integrated in the editor
- Geared towards sound-designers: complex transitions can be achieved with zero code
- Lot's of great effects, and loving the send system

Negative
- API is threadbare: no mixing callbacks, filters aren't exposed, etc...
- The only way to interact with filters is via GetFloat / SetFloat: surely that can't be enough! Why not a common interface to retrieve / modulate parameters?
- Said GetFloat / SetFloat methods can only be called from the main thread, why not from the Audio Thread?
- Creating AudioGroups at runtime would be great. Adding/Removing filters too.

Betas 10 to 22 have seen next to zero change. Does it mean that what we have now is close to final, or that major changes are being worked on?

Cheers,

Gregzo

 

Just saw that RC1 is already in closed beta, so I guess that's it, what we have is what we'll get...
Frankly disappointed. New features shouldn't be only about shiny editor tools, but also about clean, useful, maybe someday thread safe, APIs programmers can work with.

All this amazing work hidden away, no hooks, no callbacks, nothing. Seems like a huge waste...

Things the audio minded part of the community has been waiting for for years:

- Thread safety: why is AudioClip.GetData not callable from the audio thread, for example?
- Audio decoding: if Unity doesn't want to open up it's higher level audio APIs, just let us in at a lower level and let us pipe the audio data to our own containers.
- True microphone access: the current Microphone's class way of recording directly to an AudioClip of fixed size is better than nothing, but still frankly disgraceful.
- and so much more...

Anyway, rant ended. I realize most people don't use Unity for any kind of involved audio work, so why invest resources there? Unfortunately, it's also a negative feedback loop, which Unity 5 doesn't do anything to break out of.