Reverb Volumes Don't Work Properly on Mac OSX

Hello Unreal Devs!

I have found an issue with reverb/audio volumes in UE4 Version 4.11. This issue only seems to affect Mac’s and doesn’t seem to be an issue on PC

I’m a sound designer working on a horror game for a university project and i have created everything for the game on PC. Unfortunately, my tutor uses a Mac so I took my project folder from my computer, dragged my project onto a pen drive and uploaded it to my Mac desktop, from here i loaded up the game in the UE4 editor using the same version (4.11) and the audio is glitchy, cuts out and makes strange static sounds. I tried this with other projects and the same thing happened.

There was a similar post regarding reverb volumes in 4.7 which was supposedly fixed when the dev’s introduced audio volumes but this is not the case and the issue continues to pester many Mac OSX users.

If there is a fix for this, it would be greatly appreciated!

Unfortunately our mac audio code isn’t fully feature parity with PC and has a number of performance issues. I’m currently working on writing a platform-independent mixer that should fix these sorts of things between the 7 platforms we support.

Thanks for helping us Mac users. Much appreciated that you guys are making a fix for this. Thanks!!!

Still not getting any reverb on Mac 10.12.3. Should I?

Same here! 10.12.3. Unreal 4.14.3

Yeah, reverb has been broken on Mac for a while. You’d be surprised to know that a reverb instance was created for each source… aka a default of 32!

Fixing this obvious performance issue would unfortunately require a significant rewrite of the mac implementation so we decided to disable it since we were rewriting the entire mac platform back end anyway.

Feel free to re-enable it by setting CORE_AUDIO_REVERB_ENABLED to 1. But I guarantee your mac performance will not be good.

Incidentally, the mac backend for the new Unreal Audio Engine was just completed this week.

Mac and reverb work using the new audio mixer. It’s still disabled in the old audio engine since we’ll hopefully be deprecating that soon and then shortly after that, deleting it.

Mac/iOS/tvOS in the new audio mixer will run identically to the other platforms subject to minor platform issues (due to hardware device limitations or performance limitations). Specifically, the reverb code is identical now on windows/mac.

Are you using 4.17 preview?

The 4.16 version was using CoreAudio back end (and had a number of issues) but for 4.17 we switched to using AudioUnit so we could have a mostly similar iOS/Mac/tvOS backend and it should now be properly selecting your system default.

You have to set your ini to “AudioMixerAudioUnit”.

What is the current status of reverb for the Mac now that we’re at 4.17 preview? I assume the issues also include the LPF as well?

There isn’t a lot of info in the UE documentation as far as platform issues… It would be good to list what isn’t working. If it is working, it would be great to have the specific steps (and little checkboxes to look out for) to enable these effects on an audio volume.

Thanks for such a fast reply! Just knowing what is supposed to work is very useful - I got reverb working on my Mac finally and I’m looking forward to playing with some of the new stuff here.

I was thrown for a loop because I thought I was getting no audio with “AudioDeviceModuleName=AudioMixerCoreAudio”. Realized, UE editor was sending audio to my Mac’s built-in speakers instead of my MOTU, even though I have it selected in my OS system preferences. I didn’t have this issue with the old audio engine so I need to poke around a little, although I did see another user having the same issue.

Hi, are there still issues with reverbs and LPF attenuation? Using 4.23 on mac os and can’t get them to work.

Thanks,

Are you using the audio mixer in your project? Reverb is not supported in the non-audio-mixer code on Mac.

To enable the audio mixer, set the following in your default engine ini file (or the Mac platform ini file):

[Audio]
UseAudioMixer=True

Great, thanks for that! Reverb working OK.
I do notice some different behaviours using the the audio mixer. For example, random nodes seem to produce gaps between calling wav players whereas before it seemed a smooth transition between them.
Also should Audio Volumes be detecting the FPC? Seems to apply reverb to actors already within the AudioVolume but doesn’t affect FPC sounds.
Thanks for your help!