I’m getting very fed up with the poor audio support in Unity. It is seriously hindering my development due to frequent editor crashes. Any news on this subject?
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My editor and/or web player randomly crashes/hangs if my combined sounds have too high volume. It’s ridiculous. This is on a high-end computer that runs any game flawlessly and stable otherwise. I can accept that too many sounds or too high volume would result in clipping and poor sound quality, but crashes and hangs? Come on.
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The playback quality is random at best. For unknown reasons to me, similar sounds with same settings can sound totally different within Unity. These are mono sounds in 44 khz.
Do the problems lie with OpenAL itself, or is it Unity’s usage of OpenAL?
These problems are somewhat acute in my opinion. It’s not so much a feature request, but rather a plea to fix stuff that ain’t really working.
Have you logged any of these as bugs for us to investigate/look into? If not then know that we can’t fix what we might not know about so getting bugs logged ASAP will give us some hope of addressing this in the 2.6 time frame (some, not guaranteed as it will depend on the nature of the bugs in question). As to longer term plans you bet we have our eyes on some major audio overhauls but you cannot expect those in the near term just yet so getting bugs logged against the current audio engine so we can fix them is a definite priority.
I did file a bug with an offending sound file 4-5 months ago. I suppose I could reactivate that ticket which was closed when 2.5.1 was launched. I can submit an entirely new sound file that definitely is causing this bug.
If it’s the same issue then I don’t know that a new bug is needed, just let me know the existing case number and I’ll go poke it for you. 
You can work around some of the problems with Unity’s sound by passing everything through your own sound manager. We have our own SoundPlayer system that limits concurrent sounds (total and per-sound), sanity checks volume/pitch, etc.
We still see audio crackling and other problems, but it’s kept it to a minimum…
As long as OpenCrap is not replaced with some real technology (I know that FMod was in talk but without anyone of us paying at least $100 - $200 upgrade fee that won’t happen due to the licensing of it so likely a Unity 3.0 / Unity iPhone 2.0 earliest thing unless you use a plugin), you can already be happy that UT invested so much time in making it run partially consistent and stable, because UT OpenAL stands levels above what the regular OpenAL is.
Unity is actually the only OpenAL based technology I am aware of that already worked somewhere acceptable before April / May 09 on my Vista64, all others, including big million dollar budget games like Grid: Race Driver plain simply crashed on my X58 based Core i7 mainboard / lock down at init.
Agreed. Maybe:
is a potential alternative to FMod?
Seems nice, and in other games I’ve always seen it work rock solid compared to EAX and similar.