Wave Audio Instances Dropped on Android Devices.

Development Platform & Builds Mobile
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1

Hi All,

I have a problem with audios while I play the game on android devices. I have a level in which maximum of 14 concurrent wave audio instances are playing. There is no problem when I play the level on PC (even in mobile preview) but When I play the game on different Android devices, some audios are dropped! I checked the “Stat Audio” command and it shows that how many wave instances are being dropped. I checked the “Engine.ini” file and it shows that the MaxChannels for Audio is equal to 32 and it’s higher than the maximum concurrent audios that are playing but still some wave instances are dropped! Unfortunately I haven’t found anything else showing the defined audio MaxChannels setting for Android!

Is that MaxChannels setting used for all platforms including Android? Or maybe the problem is not related to Audio channels! Also I left the CommonAudioPoolSize to zero (located in Engine.ini)

I would greatly appreciate any help in resolving this problem.

Thanks in advance.

2

The Android audio device is set up to allow only 12 channels in AndroidAudioDevice.cpp. I asked around and no one seems to be able to recall specifically why 12 was chosen, if you’re compiling your own source you could try changing that and seeing if you run in to any negative outcomes.

3

Hi Marc,

Thanks for the tip. I’ll try to test the solution you gave, BTW it’s very weird to set the audio channels hard coded and the default hard coded value is very low for many games, specially shooters!

4

Marc,

I changed the MaxChannels to 32 in the AndroidAudioDevice.cpp and compiled the engine. Everything is OK on PC but it crashes on android devices when audio instances exceed from 12. So do you have any other solution?

5

Does the system log give any information as to why it has crashed?
call stack or anything?

6

I’m facing the same issue on 4.13.2 version, any solution?

7

Reviving an old thread here but the question is relevant. Does the new audio engine in 4.16 have the same limitation on number of concurrent audio waves on android? Is there a priority mechanism for dropping audio waves if needed?

8

Curious about this as well.

9

The number of channels available depends on what else the device is doing; you have no guarantee how many you can actually use. 12 was a good limit, but you may not even get that many. The new audio mixer gets around this issue. It can be enabled in 4.17.