No Sound on 7.1 Surround Sound Headset

I’ve created a small game where all of the sounds work perfectly for me. However, after I package the game and send it to a friend, he can’t hear the sound through his 7.1 surround sound headset. He can, however, hear it through his speakers if he disables the headset entirely and launches the game. This, to me, makes it seem like there is a bug in the engine.

I am currently using Unreal Engine Version 4.5.0.

Hey Barbacamanitu,

In order to use multi-channel sounds within the Engine, you need to use a specific naming convention. Here is some documentation on the naming convention you will need in order to get surround sound to work correctly.

Audio Files Documentation

General Audio Documentation

Let me know if this resolved your issue, or if you need further assistance.

Cheers,

Thanks for the response, but unfortunately that didn’t clear it up for me. For example, if I just wanted to play a song, how would I go about setting up the Actor in game to allow playback on 7.1? And how would I set up an actor that gives off a constant sound at a point in space?

All of that works on my audio set up, but not on 7.1. Do I have to use the naming convention for channels for every single sound? How would it make sense to map a sound to a specific channel when I want the engine to infer the correct mix of channels based on the audio source’s relative location to the player?

Hey again Barbacamanitu,

Yes, if you wish your entire game to run on 7.1 surround you would need to add the special naming convention to each. Also, “there is no strict speaker mapping, so the number of channels infers which channels are played on which speakers.”

The table shown in the documentation I provided tells you which speakers they will come out of based on how your sounds are set up using the extensions shown.

Cheers,

I am trying my best to understand this. If I import a sound and name it so that it plus through the left channel, it plays through the left channel? What happens when I walk around the actor producing that sound in game?

If it is tagged to play only out of a specific channel with the naming convention, I would expect it to play only out of that speaker. You can do a test and name a few different sounds with different tags to play on a specific channel. Test to see if the tags play only to a specific speaker.

But I don’t want my sounds to play out of a specific channel. I want the sound to be blended to the appropriate channels based on where the source is in relation to the player

The best way to explain it would be to provide the image and directions that are given in the documentation I linked.

Multichannel Import

If you are still confused let me know.

The problem is, I don’t want to have a separate sound for each channel. I want the same exact sound to play, just from different speakers. Do I actually have to copy my .wav file over and over again and name it using that convention? Is it not possible for UE4 to infer what channel to play the sound from based on the relative locations of the sound source and my character?

If it is in fact true that I have to copy the same .WAV file multiple times and name it differently, then I would like to request a feature: that the engine has the option to automatically generate surround sound files based on a single .wav. It feels a bit absurd to me that I would have to make more than four identical files just to the sound of a water drop dripping comes out of the correct speaker. Please let me know if I’m incorrect here.

Hi Barbacamanitu,

Just catching up on this thread.

First, nice to meet you – I’m a new dedicated audio programmer here at Epic (hired only a few weeks) and am getting up to speed on things.

I’ll address your original post since I think this thread got a bit confusing to me and I think went off in the wrong direction to help you. I do not think this is an asset issue. Without yet knowing tons of specifics about the audio code in UE4 yet, assuming this is a reproducable problem, I would tend to agree with you that this sounds like it is a lower level issue.

Before trying to see if we can internally reproduce the problem with 7.1 headphones/7.1 speakers, I’d like to ask a few questions first:

  1. Have you been able to reproduce the problem with regular 7.1 (or 5.1) speaker output?
  2. Have you confirmed that the 7.1 headphones work with other surround sound games?
  3. What brand of headphones is your friend using?
  4. Have you checked other headphone brands?
  5. Can you make a simple level in the newer version of the UE4 engine (4.6) that also reproduces this problem with your friend’s audio?

Let me know what you find and we’ll try and see if we can repro the problem on our end.

Thank you so much for keeping this question alive. I’ll try my best to answer your followup questions:

  1. I haven’t been able to try. I don’t own any 7.1 speakers.
  2. Yes.
    3/4. I can get back to you on the brand information.
  3. I will do that now, and I’ll upload the entire project to dropbox and send you the link after I have confirmed it to be not working.

Maybe you have to find a suitable player to support 7.1 surround sound to pass-though.