4.26 Multichannel wav not create surround

Following the instruction here Import Audio, I imported files (mono track wav format) with extension to UE, but they only imported as 8 separated files, the “surround” channel asset is not generated as described in the doc.

Is there any settings I need to turn on to have the extension import to work?
Or, as I need to output to 7.1 sound system, is there any manual way to do it?

1

I seem to be having the same issue, I have tried 4.27 and 5.01 as well, and I am pretty convinced that my file names follow the instructions properly, and yet, all my mono files import individually. I seem to be able to simply import a multichannel .wav file though, but even then I can’t figure out how to have it play properly as 8-channel audio output. Any guidance would be much appreciated!

Have you found a solution to this?

I went into the code and found out they removed the USoundSurroundFactory that was responsible for this since 4.26. I have no idea how they managed to create the screenshots for the UE5 documentation here, but it’s not a version that has ever been public.

You can fix this in two ways:

  • Merge the WAVs together into a single WAV using whatever tool (eg. Audacity). Use the following channel mapping for that:
enum EAudioSpeakers
{							//	4.0	5.1	6.1	7.1
	SPEAKER_FrontLeft,		//	*	*	*	*
	SPEAKER_FrontRight,		//	*	*	*	*
	SPEAKER_FrontCenter,	//		*	*	*
	SPEAKER_LowFrequency,	//		*	*	*
	SPEAKER_LeftSurround,	//	*	*	*	*
	SPEAKER_RightSurround,	//	*	*	*	*
	SPEAKER_LeftBack,		//			*	*		If there is no BackRight channel, this is the BackCenter channel
	SPEAKER_RightBack,		//				*
	SPEAKER_Count
};

Do note though currently only 1, 2, 4, 6 or 8 channels are supported. 3 or 7 channels are not!

  • Grab a copy of SoundSurroundFactory.cpp and SoundSurroundFactory.h from the 4.25 branch and drop them in the C++ solution of your project. Fix the header location, potentially upgrade some of the deprecated function calls and you will now have a “(*.WAV) Multichannel Sound” that you can select as a file-format when importing that works as described in the documentation.

Initially, I went for the second option, but the code is slightly outdated and less fancy than the current USoundFactory implementation. Eg. One of my channels didn’t have the same SampleRate as the other channels, and while the import went fine, UE5 will be unable to play the file.