Hi,
There are two toolkits. Master Audio and Audio Toolkit.
Which is better for mobile platforms (Android and iOS)?
Which would you recommend and why?
I’m evaluating both. WIll let you guys know in a week’s time.
Audio Toolkit. I have both.
Any particular reasoning for Audio Toolkit? Mind breaking it down?
Like is the workflow better? Or price?
The background is, I have a whole set of custom-made music and whole load of coding to do.
There are three kinds, background music, SFX and voice. I coded my own works initially, but ran into volume control across multiple scenes, putting lots of audio-source all over the place and managing multiple gameobjects all over the scene.
Few days ago, there was a sale! So I thought… hum… good idea to get Master Audio…
For Master Audio, you setup 3 Prefabs: MasterAudio, EventSounds and PlayListController (optional).
In MasterAudio, there is group, group-mixer and playlist. In order to add an item, you need to edit the MasterAudio.cs file because it is an enumeration.
After putting your list, you create sub Game-Objects under the MasterAudio. This contains the list of audio to play. To make it easier to connect to PlayMaker, they give you an event-sounds (OnTrigger, Visible Sound, Collision Sound events)… but PlayMaker has it’s own event trigger list. So it was straight forward to use Audio Tookit. than Master Audio.
The first anti-pattern is the footsteps. It is not a collider with terrain. it depends on what terrain it is and what you stop on. If you step on wood, it plays one sound. If you step on grass, it plays another. Not sure how since you filter by layer and all of them are terrain.
The second anti-pattern is 3 volume controls. I have 3 volume controls. SFX, Music and Voice effects. But 1 master volume control.
The third anti-pattern is the playing of SFX across walking or fighting. There are 2 sets of SFX effects which I have to group them. But they are all different, not a list. I am not even sure how to manage 20 different sounds between player and NPC interaction.
Mute? Not sure how since I want to playback the sound at 0db.
Some time later, I got the free version of Audio Toolkit. Create clone of current project, imported Audio Toolkit. It took a while to figure out things.
To set groups of volume control, there is Category Volume Control. So you set SFX, Music and Volume Control as Categories. The code I had earlier (30 lines) and NGUI slider became 5 lines.
To set play list, you set a batch of music files and pipe into the Player. It also saves the list, which means you can set up a list and try without coding. It allows you to set a list before, which makes it easy to change sounds or make it different during playback.
PlayMaker, just pass the PlayList name (string) to play. Wow. That was fast.
To set fade-in, fade-out it was directly.
There was only 1 prefab in Audio Toolkit (and one hidden, load-on-demand), not much editing code to make a new playlist or new sub-audio-item or audio group.
There is playlist, category, audio item and sub-items. So that meant one audio-item can contain multiple sounds. I could categorize each sound into either SFX or Music or Voice. If there is an optional 3 sounds or 4 sounds, I could make them different depending without too much coding.
Debugging the audio what played during sequence, there is Audio Log. What played during each second or instance?
I choose Audio Toolkit because it was easier to understand and I was in a hurry to quickly finish.
You might choose Master Audio for a 2D game, or one where you needed sound-grouping or you have existing audio-codes or some other need. I could foresee Master Audio is good for location-based (i.e., you have lots of game-objects all over the place) where you don’t have PlayMaker and want a quick solution.
You should try them on your own and decide which is best.
Good comparison at the time eskimojoe. It was a fair assessment. I only saw this thread now, two months later.
Things have changes over at Master Audio.
- It now has buses (routing controls or categories) with their own volume sliders and mute / solo buttons. However, you may have missed that each sound type has its own volume control as well. That’s been in there since before you wrote this.
- You don’t have to use the Event Sounds script. That’s just a time-saver. You can always put in single lines of code into any script file to play a sound (or particular variation) such as: MasterAudio.PlaySound(MasterAudio.SoundType.Laser)
- The enum is going away tonight. There were a handful of complaints so I made it all strings, so no code editing but you still get the dropdown of sounds in my Inspectors via some smart code.
- There has always been an Audio Log in Master Audio. Just click the checkbox to turn it on.
- You can make any number of variations for each Sound Group in Master Audio, and have it play from them randomly. You might have missed this. Each variation can have its own configurable random pitch, weight (for the randomness) and polyphony voice max.
- From the very beginning, Master Audio has built-in music ducking. No code required. That means you can configure that some choice sounds lower the music when played and then ramp back up to normal.
I’m not sure that even on the version you had, you were using Master Audio to its full capabilities. You can always ask us for certain features you’d like to add, we are receptive to that.
Regarding workflow, no way in heck Audio Toolkit is more intuitive that way. Most programmers are not good at making flow intuitive and as simple and integrated as possible. I, luckily, am one of the very few who are. If the plugin wasn’t top class in that respect I wouldn’t have released it and as one customer said: “even a 6-year old could use it”.
By the way, I used Master Audio with 100 different Sound Groups in a single scene. It is totally manageable. I am not sure what issues you had regarding that and muting. Each Sound Group has a mute and solo button. Thank you, Brian.
Hi,
There are workflow issues with MasterAudio:
- I need to separate out sound, music and voice into three or more different master audio controls. If there was some visible way to separate out the sound, music and voice that would be most helpful.
Need a way to set global volume control for the sound, music and voice.
Workflow for Master Audio: need to set dozens of volume controls. Which one is the master?
Workflow for AudioToolkit: set the group property for the sound files.
Coding workflow for Master Audio: N/A or unknown.
Coding workflow for Audio Tookit: 1 line each set / get the master volume control for sound, music and volume control.
- The enums were big issue. Suppose I pass the project to the modeller who will do the level design. The person cannot code. Then I end up in a workflow situation where this - have to code a line for this music. that music, have to code a line for that music and so on. You took this out in your Aug release. Good
Imagine yourself trying to explain to two people who has no coding experience. One has model experience the other is a musician. One has UnityPro, the other does not. Then try to explain, you need to use this to set the audio. Then you go back and forth with those two persons to setup the audio all over the place. Then it goes rapidly downhill.
Eventually, what was done, was a run-time MP3 or WAV loader which all files were stored under /streamingresources/ so the musician could test the sounds. The person went and mute and unmute certain sounds so he could test the sound files before mastering them.
If you had a run-time hidden interface, where it could be enabled for the musician who is going to make sounds and music, that would be very good idea. For us, we took the AudioToolkit demo and re-did the thing so a simple editor interface were available during run-time.
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I got my version from the asset store. I didn’t see the Audio Log or sound group at that time.
Note: the review was made 3 months back and it seems that MasterAudio was updated Aug 5th. -
The demo you provided with your MasterAudio vs. what Audio Toolkit was probably what influenced the decision. You made a simple 2D shooting demo which made lots of crashing noises vs. Audio Toolkit having a demo which shows all the features or how-to-do in a simple manner.
Please note, I am not for nor against you, I have given you an unbiased review of the teething problems we had.
I do not have time at this moment, I will revisit MasterAudio at a later date.
Well I suppose SoundManagerPro wasn’t out on the asset store 2 months ago, but how does that compare? I have it and am planning to use it for my mobile game. From the forum, I saw that the author said he was a mobile developer and it was originally designed for mobile. So far, I’ve seen good responses from other mobile developers [ one guy said there was virtually no change in framerate] . I like it a lot, it’s so easy but I haven’t had the ability to test any others [money concerns hehe]. I’m not in a stage where I can build out yet to see it on the device, but I’m curious if you tried it since then.
Hi again eskimojoe!
For #1 I added buses to the mixer section of MasterAudio, which can set volume (and mute and solo) groups of Sound Groups. This is the equivalent of category controls in Audio Toolkit. Here’s the mixer section with a couple buses:
The music, if you use the PlaylistController, has its own master volume (it didn’t at one time). And then there’s the Master Audio Master Volume which can change the volume of everything. That one is the topmost control in the Master Audio Inspector.
Yes, to change bus volume, music volume or Master Audio Master volume is all one line of code. You can also mute / solo Sound Groups with one line.
#2, I’m not sure what you mean by run-time hidden interface. What would it do? I have since made the controls on the mixer work and other volume sliders work at run-time.
#3, Yes, the sound log was there for version 1. You must have missed it. I am not positive if the Sound Group was at that time.
#4, well that’s what the demo videos are for - to show setup. Demo scenes can’t really go into that much detail. Our 2 setup videos are short and to the point. Did you get a chance to see them? I will make a new video soon since things have changed.
P.S. - I wish you had posted these concerns on the Master Audio thread or emailed us instead of posting things in a separate thread that I might have never seen. Help me help you! Especially when we have some of your money. If I don’t hear about the deficiencies, I won’t fix them and probably don’t know about them.
SoundManagerPro is a very good product (as is AudioToolkit), I checked it out. As far as I can tell it doesn’t allow you to do “sound variations”, but I could be wrong. Simple UI and easy to understand. But that’s as far as I got into it. Also, neither of those products include automatic music ducking. We do!
MasterAudio will not adversely affect framerate. I am a mobile developer as well. It was written for an already CPU-intensive mobile game and actually helped increase our FPS rate, due to being able to limit to polyphony of certain sounds easily. What you will probably find interesting is that I just submitted a free version of Master Audio to the Asset Store last night. It includes all features of the full version but limits you to 6 Sound Groups. You may subscribe to the main Master Audio thread for an update when it’s released.
From a technical point of view Master Audio is superior but for me it is imperative the support developers provide.
In Master Audio is ridiculously exceptional. They reply almost right away and they even implemented a feature I simply asked for.
You will not go wrong with Master Audio, seriously.
Thank you for the support gegagome!