Start-stop Metasound's Wave Player via Level Sequencer

Hi all! How to manage Metasound’s behavior into Level Sequencer?

sequencer cannot directly toggle a wave player inside a metasound; what it can do is bind parameters and play/stop components, so the trick is to expose the start/stop as inputs on the metasound and drive those from sequencer.

setup:

  1. in the metasound, expose inputs: a trigger named Play and a trigger named Stop (or a bool Gate that starts on true and stops on false through logic nodes), plus whatever volume you want automated.
  2. in the level: add an audio component to the actor holding the metasound (add component, audio, set the metasound as its sound, autoplay off).
  3. add the audio component to sequencer. the audio track plays and stops the sound at section boundaries; for parameter automation, add the component as a bindable object: the metasound’s exposed parameters appear as keyframable tracks (the same mechanism as blueprint set float parameter). you get tracks for floats and bools; triggers from sequencer are best expressed as bool gates instead, since sequencer animates values, not events.
  4. for precise start/stop aligned to cuts: place the sequencer audio section boundaries to start/stop the sound (that toggles the component), and inside the metasound gate the wave player on a bool that sequencer holds true while the section is active. the wave player then stops cleanly (use a release envelope so stop does not click).
  5. movie render queue caveat: audio rendering takes a different path; if this is for rendered cinematics, render audio through the audio renderer in MRQ settings, and prefer the component-based approach above so the render captures the same graph state as PIE.
    one more angle: if the goal is music that starts and stops with a sequence, often the simpler structure is two metasounds (or one with a transport input) driven by the component’s play and stop, with sequencer only controlling volume automation. fewer parameter bindings, same result.