I’m trying a simple setup in which two looping music cues start simultaneously and crossfade between each other based on proximity to the player. I added two ambient sound cues to an environment, each with a different loopable cue (both of the same length), and set their size/dropoff/attenuation appropriately, and made sure autoplay was enabled. In theory they should start simultaneously, no? But they sound completely out of sync.
Is there a simple way to get round this, bearing in mind I am very new to the scripting/blueprint system? I have a feeling the crossfade by distance node is key to all of this…?
Hey integration -
You should be able to trigger the two audio cues to play in your level blueprint. Just turn off the auto play feature in each sound, open your level blueprint. And create something like this:
Now technically you should not see a difference in perceived start time between these two audio tracks, however the play function for audio has the ability to set the exactly start time in milliseconds, so if this does not work for you, you could dial in the exact delay this way to ensure that the two audio tracks are played simultaneously.
Thank You
Eric Ketchum
Hi Eric, thanks for your answer. I copied the blueprint and both cues do trigger at start of play… but as soon as I add attenuation to them I get problems- the cues seem to trigger from their beginning every time I walk into them, rather than fading in and out of a continuous sound. Maybe I’m missing something obvious?
Any more advice appreciated.
Hi integration -
If you don’t have them set up in a sound cue as opposed to a simple sound, try that and add a looping element to the cue setup. Does that setup still cause the issue, if so please let me know and upload some screenshots of your sound details panel and cue setup.
Thank You
Eric Ketchum
Still having problems I’m afraid, tried both simple sounds and sound cues. Here’s my current
I tried using the attenuation override settings both within the sound cue and within the details panel, although i’m not sure i understand the difference between the two methods.
Unfortunately this is a long standing limitation of the Unreal Engine audio system stretching at least back as far as the start of UE3 (I’m not super familiar with the earlier engines, but I bet it was a problem then too). The core of the problem is that we don’t have any kind of channel virtualization or software mixing. Since we rely on the hardware to process the PCM data, once a sound is not being vocalized we have no way of advancing the PCM data such that when you come back in to range it is where you would want it to be.
Thanks Marc. That’s unfortunate, I was aware of some of the limitations and so was waiting for fmod integration- but there’s no word on when that will arrive. In the meantime I was hoping to find other solutions. Surely there is some way to trick the engine into vocalizing the cues from the start of play, at a volume so low the player can’t hear them, and then using attenuation to fade them in based on distance?
I’m trying to sync 3 Soundtrack WAVs as well. (Fading between them)
But Even if I start them all in one CUE at the same time, they are out of sync to begin with and keep going out of sunc more and more. This happens on PC and in iOS (iPhone6).
Is there ANY way to sync those 3 audio loops?
Thank you!
Attached is an image of my CUE setup.
Hey Joachim,
As Marc said in his post, “The core of the problem is that we don’t have any kind of channel virtualization or software mixing. Since we rely on the hardware to process the PCM data, once a sound is not being vocalized we have no way of advancing the PCM data such that when you come back in to range it is where you would want it to be.”
With that in mind, we have integrated FMOD plugin into the engine which you can use to edit and modify your sounds. You could try adding a delay before each modulator to try and sync of your sounds within the Sound Cue editor, but this could become tedious.
Cheers,
@AndrewHurley Has any of this changed yet and/or how will the new audio engine that’s coming affect this?
Yes, if you click the link below our Audio Engineer explains this is the case.
Anything that happens event wise on the game thread is guaranteed to happen at the exact same time as the audio thread in the new audio engine.
Cheers,