Audio Question for those experienced with Wwise

Hey there.

Halfway through our project we're considering the use of Wwise for greater control over music. The potential issue we're reading is that Wwise disables the use of Unity Audio Sources. We've already setup our Mixers groups and a bunch of SFX that get triggered/manipulated through Playmaker. We're hoping to keep those.

So my question, is there a way to keep our existing Mixer groups and Audio Sources without alteration, while integrating Wwise to be used just for music?

 

I would advise against running two sets of audio systems in parallel to each other. You can have all sorts of problems doing that. You really should commit to one or the other. If you use Wwise, disable unity's audio in the project settings, otherwise, drop Wwise.

 

Thanks for the reply! Just curious, what types of problems specifically? I ask because I found this post on the Wwise forums which mirrored my situation. They said running both audio systems can work, though warned it might simply result in more cumbersome methods of debugging and optimizations. Seeing as we'd keep SFX in Unity and Music in Wwise, might that not be so bad?

 

Let's see:
- you lose the automatic ability to mute sounds on music cues and vice versa (only going through your code)
- the two engines are running on dedicated, but different threads, which means waste of resources
- when you're changing volume, you need to change volume on two different systems, which is cumbersome and error-prone
- when you're ducking or applying other audio-wide effects, you need to do it manually since the two systems aren't connected
- music won't count towards the number sounds playing in the unity audio engine (automatic voice drop on too many sounds)
- sound FXs won't count towards the number of sounds playing in the Wwise engine (automatic voice drop on too many sounds)
- I'm not sure about this, but I would suspect mixing issues since the two separate threads will be playing independently (if one of them is late, it won't affect the other), so they can get out of sync

You can help some of them by developing an abstraction over your sound system, but to be honest, I really think, it worth to migrate fully onto one or the other.

FYI:
Unity's built-in audio is built on the top of an older FMOD engine.
You can consider FMOD as a replacement too. It is very similar to Wwise. (You also need to disable Unity's built in)