Audio/Video Public Roadmap - Call for Feedback

Unity Engine
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Dear Unity users of all things audio,

As part of a new initiative at Unity, we have just launched a public roadmap for audio, video, and media features and benefits. We invite you to check out what we’re working on, but also the areas we are considering for the near future when it comes to audio workflows.

While we are hard at work at changes in our media architecture, we also wish to discover how your work has evolved with current trends, new hardware with spatial audio, and new tools that you depend on.

We need your help to understand where you’re struggling in your workflow, how you’re using other tools to achieve your goals, and what you wish you could do more easily in the editor.

We would love to hear from sound designers, sound engineers, sound implementors, musicians, game programmers who implement audio clips, everyone who’s had to interact with an audio source in Unity.

Please use the feedback tools we provide in the roadmap to send us votes, comments, and insights. Each card on this interactive board is clickable, giving you more details about each topic, and will provide you with the option to share your feedback. If you accept to use functional cookies and log in using your Unity ID, then it is as simple as clicking a card, selecting how important the topic is to you, adding your point of view, and submitting. This funnels the information directly to us and makes it faster to analyse and discuss.
https://unity.com/roadmap/unity-platform/audio-video

Your voice matters, thank you in advance,

The Audio Team

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Please add on which unity versions the releases are out (or planned to be out).
Now I have no idea which version the new media encoders are in

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+1 for video live streaming…
super important these days (for build applications that display content from live streams/cams)
*just adding it here also, while voting…

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Add sample markers on AudioClip, for loops and music sections triggering! :slight_smile:

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I would like to see a change in how audio time is handled/and or reported to users to be consistent across all platforms. In webgl the audio time is reported on a per sample basis. In the standalone builds audio time seems to move in 10ms increments. Which makes building gameplay that is driven by music or are music based experiences much more difficult to get a smooth output from. Having a way to get from the output device current playback head position would be ideal.

Iirc under windows WASAPI getting device playback position is done through a call to IAudioClock::GetPosition

I believe it’s possible under mac/ios android as well, unsure of other platforms.

Additionally it would be nice to have a method to load Videos from a byte array, NativeArray, span, or a C# Stream. There is a lot of use-cases that the current limitations about data source are quite frustrating.

Finally we need more modern cross platform video format support, VP9 and AV1 mainly. VP8 just isn’t good enough anymore.

Another amazing addition would be support for the OPUS audio format natively this format is so much more space efficient while keeping quality great. I’ve seen 4x size reductions on some content when utilizing this codec. It’s basically the new successor to ogg vorbis at this point.

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I am glad to hear about this new initiative and how Unity is reaching out to its community for feedback. It’s great to see companies taking the time to understand their users’ needs and struggles in order to improve their products.

I encourage everyone who works with audio in Unity to take a look at the roadmap and provide their feedback. This is a valuable opportunity to make your voice heard and help shape the future of audio in Unity. It’s also a chance to learn about upcoming features and improvements that could make your workflow easier and more efficient.

Thank you for reaching out to the Unity community and for your commitment to improving audio workflows in Unity.

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Byte[ ] → AudioClip please :slight_smile:

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Hi @PeachyPixels , I’m combing through the forums to look at features to be added for consideration. This is one of them :slight_smile:

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@KalUnity3D great news! Is LiveStream playback added to list too?

*and additional suggestion, it would be super great if unity had proposal system like godot has

i know there is productboard, but its just so … difficult and hidden, no search, no comments, community cannot help etc

if you would have central easy to access place like github,
everyone would save time,
unity would progress faster on important things,
then no need to search random forum posts,
and most suggestions get lost in forums anyway..

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:slight_smile: That’s great news! Thank you @KalUnity3D

Happy to volunteer as a tester if it helps.

If newer\better features are in the longer term pipeline, even a temporary workaround (using UnityWebRequest) would be of great help.

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Streaming is certainly on for consideration but we are currently working through priorities - for now I’d strongly suggest looking at non-native alternatives if it’s critical for your project. I’m going to update the public facing roadmap this quarter to make sure everything’s in one place.

I like the idea around the github issues and the way its more transparent to the users, alongside the ability to help and provide additional context. Productboard is quite integrated in the way we work at Unity now, but I will raise it with the Productboard leads to see if there is a way we can expand the scope, or if there is a better way of handling a more community-based approach.

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A way to also use span or NativeArray would be great as well and not just limiting it to C# arrays. Additionally adding similar support to VideoClips would be amazing. We have some audio and video data that gets packed into a custom obfuscated container format that gets memory mapped at runtime so not needing to extract files to disk to play then would be great.

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Please add support for true seamless video looping if not already supported. This is holding back a ton of cool applications!

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Please add rewind feature for VideoPlayer

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AudioSource Real-Time-Parameter-Controls (RTPC) would be amazing :roll_eyes:

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Is this a tease for what’s to come?

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Haha! I actually just hope it is, that’s not my call!

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News just went out 5 hours ago that Valve just released Steam Audio fully open-source under the Apache 2.0 license. Here’s the repository.

Best thing about this is that it has Audio Raytracing, something that I read that even FMOD doesn’t have (I heard it can only get this by using Steam Audio under the hood). Based on this Reddit comment, it has lots of functions meant to be used with true 3D ambisonic audio and mesh occlusion (and the raytracing settings being configurable).

Think Unity can take advantage of this and integrate it natively in the engine, @SeventhString ? Or is Unity already working on something similar to this?

Edit: Here’s a demo of it in action. The video is 3 years old so there should already be a lot of improvements added into it.

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Hi @KalUnity3D

Just wondering if there’s been a decision on this feature yet? If so, any ideas when it might make it to a production build?

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This is awesome in fact! But I think we have a lot of ground to cover before going there… It would be a great topic for a package though!

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