[Help Request] Some Audio Questions

Development Audio
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Hello, I’m new to the engine and I’m very happy with my purchase of Unreal 4. I’m relatively new to game designing and my main concern is, as fairly new developer taking the role as a sound designer, I can’t find too many audio tutorials. So I have multiple questions which I hope the community could help me answer, whether in full or partially. I’d really appreciate any support you can give me, and I hope within time I can also be one to share knowledge with other new users within the community. Thank you guys.

1) I cannot figure out how to create directional audio. I’ve enabled spatilization yet nothing has worked. I still hear the audio as if being played in surround stereo. My question is this, does the .wav file have to be Mono before it can have 3d directional effects? Here is pic of the sound cue setup. **UPDATE: Resolved by creating mono sound file **Screenshot - 8c57f4d86cd3592673ae163255149cca - Gyazo

2) Can a stereo file be converted to mono within the Engine? When right clicking a imported wav file and selecting the “property matrix” it allows me to see the “number of channels” (The sample rate below it leads me to believe the num of channels is read only) Screenshot - 6385d625e34868e292816e42c521c89f - Gyazo

**3)**What is the proper way of syncing footsteps to animations? I’ve went to the ‘Run animation>addNotify>PlaySound’. There is a few things with this though…

A) If i wanted to set the animations to play different sounds on different materials how does one do this? I know this has been briefly answered in another thread, but a bit more clarity would be nice.

B) If the character continues to run towards a wall, the animations till plays, therefor the sound of footsteps is still being triggered while running towards a wall. Though this sounds more like a coders fix, is there anything a sound designer can
do?

4) Is there a particular way to create sound files for Surround sound? If i wanted to have amazing ambient sounds for 5.1 or 7.1, What would I have to do? Ex: I want bird sound effects to have 7.1 , do i need to have multiple .wav files for 7.1, do they
need to be mono? ect.

5) Does Wwise actually support UE4 users at the moment, and is it worth it to learn? There website seems to say UE4 Supports Wwise, but only certified epic developers. Pic and Link below.

https://www.audiokinetic.com/downloads/

6) Does anyone know when a more in depth audio support document or video will be released, and does anyone have any sources,websites, or tips for someone new in the field like me to learn about audio within the Unreal Engine 4? (Not so much UDK unless you feel it’s valid for UE4) I appreciate you taking the time to read this, as I know it’s a bit large and sporadic. Thank you again!

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Hi Akeesling0028,

I’m not too familiar with the Audio system in UE4 but perhaps this documentation may help you find the answers you’re looking for. Link Here.

Also, we have in Content Examples project from the Marketplace. When you open this project > Open level > Audio.umap

We have some practical examples setup for you to see how they work and are used.

Thank you!

Tim

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Thank you for the fast response Tim! It is very appreciated, I’ve read that audio link multiple times, and have it bookmarked, however I was unaware of the Audio level within the Content Examples! The main problem I have though, is all the projects I’ve previously downloaded from the market place failed to open. I received an error “Failed to launch editor”. I post a screenshot here :

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Can you post this on the AnswerHub in the Bugs section, if you haven’t already? This will get you a quicker response and see what’s going on here. This shouldn’t be happening and we would like to help you get that resolved as quickly as possible.

Tim

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To clarify what said, you can contact us to get a free commercial license of Wwise, and then head over to our page to get the Wwise integration into UE4: https://.com/audiokinetic/WwiseUE4Integration

As of today, our integration is on version 4.1 of UE, but we are actively working on getting it to work on 4.2 very soon.

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I replied in your other thread (which I am going to delete as a duplicate in a second). Some of this has already been covered in other people’s responses, but I’m just going to dump it out as I had typed out originally in the other thread.

  1. Yes, only single channel sounds can be spatialized. Probably wouldn’t be the worst thing to output a warning if you try to do so. The documentation should also mention this, I will let the docs team know.
  2. No. We don’t have any conversion mechanics in the editor.
    3A) You could create your own PlayFootstepSound anim notify blueprint which looks up the sound to use from a property on the actor playing the animation.
    3B) If the animation is playing you are going to be limited in what you can do at a sound design level.
  3. https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest...WAV/index.html has details on how to import them. It is lacking in providing all the channels suffixes, I will mention that to the docs team as well. The complete is _fl, _fr, _fc, _lf, _sl, _sr, _bl, _br
  4. You have to talk directly to AudioKinetic to get wwise for UE4. There is no drop in , it requires making engine code changes that they provide the instructions on.
  5. The audio system isn’t dramatically different than UE3, though there are some significant changes and workflow improvements. There is an audio map in the content example project. Details here: https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest...dio/index.html