I’ve just sent the following by e-mail to Wayne Johnson. Hopefully we’ll get a reply!
Cheers,
Gregzo
Dear Wayne, I hope you are well. I wanted to let you know how much audio minded unity devs would appreciate a little heads up from you regarding the state of the newly introduced audio functions (3.5). Unity 3.5.6 only solves one of the issues, and documentation is still very sparse. As you might be aware, I’ve started a thread to list all known audio bugs / quirks here : http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/147834-A-list-of-audio-bugs-%28iOS-mostly%29 I’m sure you are extremely busy working on 4.0, but taking a few minutes to communicate your views and plans to Unity customers would be beneficial to all! Many thanks, Gregzo
Unity has two relatively new audio programmers, Wayne Johnson and Jan Marguc.
While I’m sure they’d be happy to try and answer some questions for you, making a preliminary post like this before you get any reply seems a little odd. Also making Wayne’s email susceptible to mining isn’t very nice (I’m removing it).
I’m sorry if my post seemed aggressive, and I apoligize for divulging Wayne’s address : that wasn’t intentional, I posted a bit quickly and in frustration after having read 3.5.6’s release notes.
What I find odd is that we haven’t seen the new audio programmers on the forums at all. Soren participated, and that was both reassuring and enlightning. I’m sure it would also benefit Unity not to have all these posts about audio bugs left unanswered by the specialists.
We’ve been waiting months for answers regarding audio issues, and as much as I understand how difficult and time consuming they might be to solve, I have more trouble understanding why Unity doesn’t communicate at all on at least a fix window : Unity 3.5.7 ? Unity 4.0 ?
Please understand that as happy as most of us are with Unity, this situation is making us audio minded devs lose A LOT of time.
Unity has multiple community outlets—forums, Unity Answers, the new “Learning” centre, and even blogs—so that’s a lot to keep track of. With over a million users, the community is also vast and it’s not easy to keep the signal : noise ratio at a decent level. Finally, not everyone like visiting or posting on forums. (For me, it’s a massive time-sink as I have a bad habit of writing long replies.)
Unity’s audio system is (if memory serves) built on the FMOD middleware, which means some components are out of UT’s control and they may be relying on outside development teams to fix some of the bugs.
But, most important of all: programmers can either spend time on forums, or they can spend time on actually programming. Do you want the bugs fixed, or not?
But please don’t exaggerate my request to the absurd : of course I don’t want the audio programmers to spend their time babysiiting us on the forums. All I’m asking for is a heads up regarding the situation, and all I’m complaining about, after months of patience, is the utter lack of an audio road map. I don’t care through which outlet Unity communicates on the issue, just that they do.
Unity’s great, the community is very nice and I enjoy getting help as much as helping out where I can (mainly audio), but that doesn’t mean everything is always hunky-dory. My request is polite, and shared by many other (sometimes less polite) audio devs.
Actually such ‘open letters’ are transparent in their efforts to shame the recipient(s). It’s a common and increasing ineffective tactic in the open source and political communities.
Of course, the aim of an open letter is to put a little pressure, but I don’t believe mine is offensive in any way. I’m not trying to “shame” anyone, least of all the devs in question.
I don’t think you’ve much use for Unity’s newly introduced audio functions, as if you would, you would certainly understand the frustration. I bought the product because of their promises. They are broken. I’ve been testing them for months, trying to understand where the bugs are and posting my findings to help others. So please, don’t patronize.
Somthing like a full on equalizer would be cool . Like I’ve played with the reverb settings to do interesting effects , but that’s nothing compared to being able to directly affect frequencies .
I’m guesing this would be a pro-feature anyway , but its cool to dream…
I agree with goat, that open letters, forum posts, any attempt at communication regarding audio bugs fails to reach Unity. But for us audio developers who have been knocking our heads against Unity, all these defences of Unity are really patronizing, we’ve been through all the normal routes of bug reports, nice forum posts, as an Indie developer I’ve spent several thousand on non-transferable unity licenses which I can’t even sell and leaving angry forum posts seems like the best way to deter anyone from using Unity on iOS, it’s like someone just cobbled it together, so Unity fan boys before you go commenting that angry software engineers aren’t taking youre nice and reasonable route just remember they’ve already been down that route and nothing happened, and maybe they might be nice enough to support you once you find yourself in this boat.
Hi,
well, I too think that a little bit of pressure from community is somewhat ok when it is plausible, and in case of audio subsystem I, unfortunately, think it is
Lots of bugs and quirks that require various trial and error workarounds and really defensive coding when some features while poorly documented sometimes don’t even deliver the least level of reliability ( I was hoping more audio bugs would be fixed in 3.5.6, but oh well )
Support straight from the devs would be nice, but I have to partly agree with @stimarco on this - it would not be effective for them to provide support constantly, although bit of chiming in as to where the current development/fixing is and where it is heading definitely wouldn’t hurt me too! )
All the above debate on proper/useful communication etiquette notwithstanding, I too would appreciate knowing the status of the issues enumerated on gregzo’s problem thread. I’ve run into a few of them myself and would really appreciate having some indication as to when or if they will be fixed.
Thanks for the feedback! Unfortunately gregzo, Jan and I were not aware of your audio bug/quirk thread until your post here and to my email. We are just going over all the posts now and getting a response formed, which will hopefully not only address your concerns but also give an idea of where we are heading with audio in the future.
My attendance on the forums has unfortunately been sparse as we are still trying to catch up on a whole backlog of issues, but hopefully that will change in the future as the audio wheels start rolling.
Thanks a lot for taking the time to reply. I’m very much looking forward to seeing in action the results of the new audio team’s work!
Apoligies if my campaigning seemed a bit aggressive, but as the updates rolled and nothing got fixed, the mood steadily declined.
Before 3.5, Unity was basically useless for audio minded devs. 3.5 opened up all these exciting possibilties, which when ironed out will surely draw a new batch of devs to the engine.
Feel free to let me know if you need testers for the new audio stuff. I only own the iOS basic license so am not in the 4.0 beta. Would have upgraded months ago if it were not for the audio issues…
@r618 - Hi, in your post on the other thread you detailed an issue with GetSpectrumData returning shifted data on iOS. You mentioned that we had reproduced and confirmed the bug. Can you give the case number for this, I’m having trouble finding it in the system.
Hi wkaj, it should be #477161
There’s a reply to this issue in the other thread mentioning different sample rate, however, the resulting shape is also different; have a look @ repro case, it should be clear
Thanks for replies so far
@r618 - I just sent you a private message with some small modifications of your example project to visualize the effect that changing the sample rate has on the obtained spectrum. As I see it, nothing unexpected is happening.
(I’m removing it).
, but its cool to dream…