How do I mute an audio track in a level sequence via a blueprint

Development Audio
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Hopefully this is another easy question. I have a level sequence with 2 audio tracks on it. When my animation blueprint transitions from one state to another, I need to be able to mute one of the two audio tracks in the playing level sequence. I’ve searched online, and haven’t been able to find anything on this. I’m thinking I can do something with the Director Blueprint (which is actually defining the moments where the track should be muted/unmuted.)

Thanks!

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I don’t think there’s a way to do that directly. Though that’s a good feature request -- and strangely the first time I’ve heard anybody wanting to do this. I guess it takes an imagineer to imagine muting an audio track in sequencer. :stuck_out_tongue:

But, good news is that you can certainly mute audio dynamically. This is probably why it hasn’t been asked as sound designers have very powerful means of control volumes of their sounds outside of sequencer. And I think at scale, it’s easier to juggle fewer assets that control things more wholistically then specific sequencer tracks.

There’s a number of ways to do it. I recommend checking out audio modulation (a plugin).

Check out:

Audio Modulation Overview in Unreal Engine | Unreal Engine 5.6 Documentation | Epic Developer Community

With audio modulation you can make a control bus and apply that to the volume of the sounds you want to dynamically control. Then in BP you can script up what you want to do with volume manipulation (muting, ducking, etc).

It’s a bit more complicated.

In case I’m missing anything, I’ll ask around to the sequencer team if there’s a way to maybe “mute” a track generically -- as in, outside of audio, but maybe disabling it will work?

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Thanks.

I was able to get it to mostly work by creating a reference to the Movie Scene Audio Secion and changing the “Is Active” property. It’s not quite perfect as 'd prefer to have volume control.

From reading the link on Audio Modulation, I’m not sure I can do what I want with it. Essentially I have a level sequence with an animation track, and 2 audio tracks that are the full length of the scene (roughly 3 minutes), need to stay perfectly synced, and just play continuously. One audio track is music, the other is vocals. The track I want to mute is the vocal track only. I want this to occur when some external event happens, followed by the animation blueprint switching to a different state to play a short animation. with a corresponding audio clip (again, with the music continuing to play in the background from the level sequence.) When this short animation is done, I need it to transition back to the level sequence and pick up where the level sequence is currently at.

For the most part I have this working, but blending between a level sequence animation and animations driven from an animation blueprint do not seem to utilize the blending settings. They seem to snap between the too. I know I could manually adjust the weight in the level sequence to more smoothly go between the two, but I don’t see a way of doing that from a blue print dynamically. Is there something that I’m missing that would allow me to specify the blend from level sequence animation to one driven by an ABP?

Thanks!

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Thanks Dustin.

Any thoughts on my question about blending between animation running in a level sequence (long background animation) and short clips that are triggered from an animation state machine blueprint?

Thanks!

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Hey Jerry,

I found somebody from the Sequencer team who has yet another idea on how to do this. I’ll forward the ticket over to them in case you have follow ups. They are way more expert in Sequencer tricks than myself.

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Hey there,

Depending on your needs, you could use sequencer track conditions. Tracks can have conditions that can be evaluated on start or on tick to enable or disable them; these can also be written in blueprint. You can see conditionals in the right-click menu of the audio track. You can see me access them in the image below. You can also create them in blueprint.

[Image Removed]

The downside of this approach is that you wouldn’t be able to fade out your audio as it mutes, it disables the track immediately. If you need to fade it out, you would need to look into the audio modulation that was suggested above, by sending events out or using an external manager blueprint pushing data on tick. Director blueprints cannot check data on tick.

Dustin

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Perfect thank you! I’ll give that a shot.

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Yep,

When you play an animation on a character in the sequencer, it uses the montage slot interface. So there are 2 things that you need do to be able to blend them.

  1. When you play animation on a character blueprint, you can define an animation mode, in this case choose Use Animation Blueprint.[Image Removed]
  2. Specify the slot that you want the animation to play the animation on in the animation track. (In the screenshot below it’s in the Advanced->Playback portion of the Section’s Property view)

[Image Removed]From there, you can modify how you want the slot to exist and blend in the structure of your anim bp.

Dustin