I think "Allow Background Audio" is not working

[Ivan3z]

I opened a thread on the forum because the audio doesn’t seem to work in a specific situation.

You can see all details here:

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I have a problem in my project. I have reproduced the problem in a new blank project. These are the project files: UISoundProblem.zip (13.2 MB) The problem is a sound can not be played in a UI (more or less) It does works when the player is shooting itself (see this video). When shooting to other player. The event work, the amimation work, but the sound does not work. I don’t want to replicate the audio. I just want the player to be the only one that can hear it when he get any damage. H…

A user gave me a solution:

I need help to fix an audio problem (UserWidget)

Can you try to set “AllowBackgroundAudio” to true in the editor settings? It is disabled by default - and I think that is why you are not hearing any sound (because the second PIE window has no user focus and thus is in the background) [image] Let me know if this fixes it

ENABLE: “Level Editor/Miscellaneous/Allow Background Audio”

But that option doesn’t seem to work (See Video Attached Here).

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Hi @Featuriing Unfortunately that didn’t solve the problem. Thank you very much for your help. Very appreciated

I think the user is right, and seem that option doesn’t work like he says it should.
In any case i cannot test the audio correctly.

If it is a bug, please fix it.

And if you know a console command to enable this option, please let me know.
It will be useful for me while the bug is fixing.

Thank you so much!!

[GreasyExcretion]

@Ivan3z Any solution to this yet? Also could you please share the bug report

Edit (Solved)
You can either set allow background sound in the editor preferences
or
add the following to DefaultEngine.ini (project folder) or to your unreal installation BaseEngine.ini

[Audio]
UnfocusedVolumeMultiplier=1.0

This can also be added to any (other) Unreal-based game you have bought, if there’s no support for such through their options.

My case was very peculiar because I’m running two clients and I only need audio from one of them (one “game”, another is a control panel of sorts - connected by networking). To solve that additional problem, I added au.Debug.SoloAudio to commands.

[Ivan3z]

Hi @GreasyExcretion

Yes, this solution worked for me.

I need help to fix an audio problem (UserWidget)

Can you try to set “AllowBackgroundAudio” to true in the editor settings? It is disabled by default - and I think that is why you are not hearing any sound (because the second PIE window has no user focus and thus is in the background) [image] Let me know if this fixes it

Than you so much for sharing your solution too.

[EarHax]

Just FYI, in case anyone else changed this setting, tried launching PIE again after, and still couldn’t hear audio from backgrounded/unfocused PIE/editor windows, you need to relaunch Unreal Editor after changing this setting in order for it to take effect when running PIE.

And if that doesn’t work for you, I also followed instructions in another post to add/edit the following setting:
UnfocusedVolumeMultiplier=1.0
Which I added under [/Script/Engine.AudioSettings] in the \Saved\Temp\Win64\PROJECTNAME\Config\DefaultEngine.ini, and under \Config\DefaultEngine.ini from the unreal project root, and also to the BaseEngine.ini under [Audio] in \Saved\Temp\Win64\Engine\Config\BaseEngine.ini

So I’m not sure if it was the Allow Background Audio setting, or the UnfocusedVolumeMultiplier=1.0 setting in the config files, but one of these worked for me after restarting UE.