Noticable delay when playing an AudioClip, suggestions?

I'm working on a game where there are lots of collisions, and I'm playing one shot audio clips upon each collision. The clips are less than a second long, and because it's a mobile game, they are compressed. Unfortunately, once the files are compressed, there is a brief silence added to the beginning of the file, causing a very obvious disconnect between the collision and the sound.

I've read every piece of documentation available from Unity, but the only suggestion offered is to use uncompressed files for soundFX. Unfortunately, that's not an option for mobile games. Any help/suggestions are much appreciated at this point.

Something to note: this is not an issue on iOS, just Android.

 

Hi!
Don´t know if this is the issue, but I have read about a general audio latency issue on the Android platform in general

 

Thanks for the reply, I think I remember hearing that too. There are plenty of games out on Android though, I have to assume there's a reasonable solution.

 

We have that issue with our game Stellar Escape. On iPhone it works fine, but on Android there is a small delay when playing audio. Really annoying. Seems to be an Android issue though, just as you are saying.

 

Hi!

Is there any progress with this issue?

 

It's an Android issue...we are just dealing with it.

 

Bumping old thread. A couple of questions.

1) Did anyone ever find a workaround to this?

2) Is the delay consistent on all android devices? It is always right around 0.4 seconds on my Nexus S.

3) Is this being fixed in 3.4?

 

Also curious about this fix.. It is a problem in one of our games but works fine on the IOS build.

-Dane

 

Did you tried to change the Sound File settings to "Load type: Decompressed on load", instead of "Compressed in memory"?

This way the files would be compressed in the APK, but would be uncompressed when the scene is loaded, so they will only have to be decoded once on the load of the scene instead of every time it has to be played

 

It's the year 2013 and audio latency still sucks!!!! holy crap google wtf are you doing....

 

Agreed. They make billions and they can't fix a little lag issue?

But still, Android is a blatant money making machine and not much else, so it's somewhat to be expected.

If I'd known about this beforehand I probably would not have begun my project and gone to work at Sainsbury's instead.

 

(Bumping old thread)

On my HTC one SV there is a sound delay
On my Galaxy note there is no sound delay. That's working fine.

Why is that? It's both Android.

 

Since unity apparently are not interested in this horrible bug, has anyone found a workaround to make SFX in android without such big delays?

 

I've watched that talk and it's pretty insightful, but for as far I know the latency problem still exists.

 

Yep latency is still brutal but it is Extremely device dependent. My Quad Core Sony Xperia Z has up to 0.5 s delay on Android 4.2.2 but a mate's 2.3 HTC and another 2.3 Samsung show no lag at all!

Basically, I have set my output buffer to (256, 2) which is ultra small and this is the only way I can make the delay significantly small. All other things I've tried actually produce no difference AT ALL.

I read somewhere that Android likes 48k sampling but a Debug.Log of outputsamples shows clearly that it is in fact 24000 and I am beginning to think that this is what is causing my problem.

470-471 is the magic number...

 

A alot of apps have extremely low latency on all android devices (Magic piano for example), so its possible....

 

I've written an asset that uses the native Android audio system for low-latency playback.

Check it out.

Asset Store: Android Native Audio

 

The latency will always be there. If your sound is not a result of player's interaction you could potentially play the sound early on purpose. (You know there will be a collision, so you can play the sound early) Each device has different latency, but a safe number is 0.1ms.

Or you could go native to make instantaneous play faster. I just made Native Audio asset store plugins which can make a native call to both iOS and Android's fastest native way from one central interface. https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/#!/content/107067

There are various ways of playing audio at native side, here's my choice :

- On iOS it uses OpenAL. It is faster than AVAudioPlayer, AudioToolbox, and SystemSound.
- On Android it uses AudioTrack, I confirmed it to be faster than SoundPool and no meaningful difference from C++ side OpneSL ES of NDK.

I have compiled all of my findings in here : http://exceed7.com/native-audio