Veemix - a music plugin for Unity iOS

EDIT (December 16, 2014): Veemix has published a paper on licensing, contracting, and finding music for your game. Download the PDF here: The Indie Game Developer's Guide to Music

Hi, I’m part of the team that developed Veemix, a music plugin for Unity iOS that just landed on the Asset Store today. I’m so excited about the plugin and I want to give an overview of its functionality and offer assistance in deploying it inside your games.

Demo Video #1 - Playing with Veemix in streaming mode, showing optional streaming UI

Demo Video #2 - Playing with Veemix in iOS Music mode

What Veemix Does

Veemix lets game developers integrate music into their games using the iOS Music library or Soundcloud as a streaming source. This allows developers to bypass often complicated music licensing and makes a huge amount of music available to use within a very lightweight package (1.9 MB).

Veemix music is integrated with in-game events, so as a player plays through a game using Veemix, they will experience a dynamic soundtrack that has contextual relevance to game scenes and action. For example, imagine a player approaching an enemy boss character. Veemix can automatically cue and play music for this scene using tag keywords like “battle, scary, danger”. This is similar to spotting the gameplay when working with a composer.

Players can share, download, and rate Veemix playlists for their favourite games. Game developers can set a Recommended Playlist for their game, which gets promoted amongst the other shared playlists.

How Veemix Works

Developers create tagged areas within their game, called Veemix Events. These events are simply regular Cube game objects with a few descriptive keywords attached to them.

When a player character encounters a Veemix Event while playing in iPod mode, the plugin presents the option to select a song from their device’s iOS Music library based on the keywords and then adds it to the Veemix playlist, and will start playing a song automatically from the device’s library if a selection had been made previously.

In streaming mode, the plugin automatically cues and starts playing music from Soundcloud that has been tagged with the Veemix Event’s keywords. The game developer can configure this to happen entirely in the background, or display an interface to the player that lets them “Thumbs Up” the currently streaming song, which adds it to the Veemix playlist, or “Thumbs Down” the current song to skip to the next available song. Currently, Veemix will deliver 150 streamable songs as a payload for each Veemix Event that is encountered. This makes Veemix an excellent music discovery tool!

Getting Started

You can download the Veemix plugin for free from the Asset Store here: http://u3d.as/ao9

Try it out in your project, and when you’re ready to publish your game, register for a Game ID the Veemix website. This adds your game to the Veemix database, enabling the plugin’s social networking and sharing features.

Support

The Veemix Team wants to help you build Veemix into your games. We can even build custom versions depending on your game’s requirements. The easiest way to reach us is to email us directly. We will be taking feedback and feature requests on the Unity Forums too. You can even schedule a one-on-one Skype session for support (email us to set it up!).

We hope you enjoy using Veemix!

Alexander
Developer, The Veemix Team
info@veemix.com

 

Interesting idea.

On your website I am unable to open the FAQ answers, I can only see the start of the answers.

 

Thanks for the heads up wetcircuit, it should be fixed now.

 

Bumping this thread for the new Indie Game Developer's Guide to Music, published by Veemix and available for free as a PDF!

 

Pretty sweet idea!

I'm attempting to implement this in to my Unity experiments game to play around with the idea. I'm pretty sure I've followed your guy's instructions pretty well but no dice on hearing any music.

Does it play in the editor or is that a no go?

 

Hi Bridin, thanks for using Veemix!

Music playback in the Unity Editor won't work because Veemix relies on iOS native classes for both its streaming (SoundCloud) and iOS Music modes. If you deploy your Unity project to iOS (Unity will generate an Xcode project), you should be able to test out the streaming mode in the Xcode Simulator. However, if you want to test the iOS Music mode you will need to build the Xcode project to an actual iOS device, because the Simulator does not have a media library.

Let us know if you have any other questions!

 

Gotcha! Thanks for the reply!

 

Just started playing with this in Unity5.4.1 Does this also allow the user or developer to search and select in soundcloud?