According to the AmbisonicAudio.pdf documentation, the framework can support ambisonic order 2 since 2017.1 version. I’ve tried to import a 9 channel wave file as an ambisonic asset … but an unspecified error occurred when adding the wave file.
As the error occurred before I can specify the asset as ambisonic, I assume that Unity has a problem to read multichannel wave file. Maybe there’s a limit to 8 channel since it works for a first order file with 4 channels.
Can someone enlighten me on the subject?
Did you find the answer to this? Or can anyone else enlighten us?
It looks like I’ve had exactly the same journey as you 3 months later.
On the decoder end, I realise Oculus’ ambisonic decoder only supports 1st order ambisonics and I expect that’s the case for Google’s Resonance decoder too (although I can’t find it definitively clarified in their documentation), but it would be nice to be able to get a 9-channel 2nd order ambix into Unity.
As an update to this, it appears that there is indeed an 8-channel import limit in Unity currently.
There is a thread on the Resonance SDK discussion here:
https://github.com/resonance-audio/resonance-audio-unity-sdk/issues/17
This would be a feature request from us, as 2nd order ambisonics support would make it a lot easier to implement much better audio!
Any updates here, can files with more than 8 channels be imported now? Just tried in Unity 2019.2.9 and it I still get an error.
Come on Unity !
I agree importing second order ambisonic (9 channels) is a must to do a decent job. Does anybody have a solution to export first order ambisonic (4 channel) file from unity? Doing 3d sound in unity works well for games but how do you export the ambisonic sound to a third party audio application if you are planning to make sound for a 360 movie?
Thanks for your help!
This is the error I receive when trying to import a 9 Channel ambisonic audio file:
Error: Cannot create FMOD::Sound instance for clip “audiofilename” (FMOD error: The sound created exceeds the allowable input channel count. This can be increased using the maxinputchannels parameter in System::setSoftwareFormat. )
UnityEngine.GUIUtility:ProcessEvent(Int32, IntPtr, Boolean&)
It’s strange that I am getting an FMOD error. I did not think unity had any FMOD components that come pre-installed in the engine, however it appears there are some included. The error states that the channel limit count can be increased using some FMOD API parameters. I cannot find anything in the documentation that explains why there are FMOD components or what is the issue for the 8 Channel count limit.
I am looking into if a custom import script could fix this issue. If the issue is that the Unity Mixer doesn’t support more than 8 channels, I don’t think there is a way to achieve this without 3rd party audio plugins.
This is a workaround however its quite a process.
Wwise supports high channel count files. I’ve used it for 2nd and 3rd order audio files and they sound really great.
There is quite a learning curve for installing and operating Wwise properly. I really had to have 3rd order ambisonic files for a Unity project and Wwise did the job quite nicely.
Unity audio is based on FMOD, but any references to FMOD::System is basically useless since it’s not exposed and max. supported channels for audio media is ~~ 6 IIRC
You can, however, use FMOD Studio / their Unity Integration (and Resonance) for ambisonics