Wwise® – WaveWorks Interactive Sound Engine® – is the industry's only complete audio pipeline solution. Designed to suit your workflow, Wwise features the tight integration of an advanced audio authoring tool and a robust sound engine.

Because it allows you to prototype new projects right out-of-the-box, is workgroup ready, and is easily integrated into next-generation game engines, Wwise helps save time and money across the audio production of any game title.

By addressing the specific needs of both audio programmers and sound designers, Audiokinetic has created the ideal solution for all of today's game development pipelines.

Click here to download a .pdf overview of Wwise.

New in 2009.1

Projects

The following additions and enhancements have been made in the area of project management:

• Work units can now be unloaded from a project resulting in faster project load times and general user interface performance enhancements.
• A new toolbar has been added to the Project Explorer that speeds up the creation of child or parent objects in your project hierarchy.
• A Quick Search field has been added to Wwise toolbar, allowing you to quickly find objects in your project by typing their names.
• A "default” value can now be set for game parameters.
• The Trigger Rate transition for containers can now be modified using RTPCs.
• A new auto-ducking option has been added that allows you to set a "maximum volume attenuation" per bus.

Audio File Management

The following additions and enhancements have been made in the area of audio file management:

• Wwise now supports Vorbis audio files with up to 5.1 channels.
• Default conversion settings can now be set and applied to new sound objects when they are created in Wwise.
• The “Originals” audio file folder now supports subdirectories.
• Wwise now reads files directly from the “Originals” folder resulting in a faster import and SoundBank generation process. As a result, the “Imported” cache folder has been removed.
• Wwise now includes automatic sample rate conversion, which converts audio files using a sample rate selected by Wwise after performing an FFT analysis of the file.
• The Conversion Settings dialog now shows the conversion results for each selected audio source.
• A new ‘As Input’ sample rate option allows you to convert audio files using the same sample rate as the original file.
• The sample rate library has been updated and now provides better quality conversions.

Interactive Music

The following additions enhancements have been made in the area of Interactive Music:

• Music objects can now be dragged from the Project Explorer to the Stinger and Transition lists.
• Transition rules can now be copied and pasted within the transition matrix.
• Transitions can now randomly sync to cues or custom cues within the destination music segment.
• The Interactive Music engine now compensates for XMA codec latency.

Wwise - General Enhancements

The following performance enhancements have been made:

• Audio files no longer need to be updated.
• Audio file conversion now takes advantage of your workstation’s multiple cores, if available.
• Project load times have been optimized and can be further reduced by unloading unnecessary work units.
• Time to populate the Conversion Settings dialogue has been significantly reduced.
• Time to populate the event viewer has been significantly reduced especially for large projects.
• Time to load the Audio File Importer dialog box has been reduced.
• Operations within the Project Explorer have been optimized.
• The Game Profiler has been optimized to better handle the large amounts of data that are captured from the sound engine.

Effects

The following additions and enhancements have been made in the area of effects:

• A new high quality reverb effect called “RoomVerb” has been created. This new reverb effect contains early reflection models, as well as more reverb and tone controls.
• Close to 100 new factory effect presets have been created.

SoundBanks

The following additions and enhancements have been made in the area of SoundBanks:

• A real command line application has been created to generate Soundbanks.
• You can now create global, non-platform-specific pre and post generation steps.
• The SoundbanksInfo.xml is now available before the pre-generation steps.
• The "Copy Streamed Files" post-generation step is now performed by an external tool. The sample code for this tool is provided within the SDK.
• Several enhancements have been made to the SoundBanks Log, both in terms of functionality and feedback that is generated.

Positioning

The following additions and enhancements have been made in the area of positioning:

• Distance attenuation and cone angle can now be previewed in Wwise from within the Attenuation Editor.
• A new option has been added for 3D User-defined positioning, which allows sound paths to follow the orientation of the listener.
• The horizontal and vertical coordinates of each point within a 3D User-defined sound path can now be randomized.

Sound Engine – SDK

The following additions and enhancements have been made in the area of the sound engine and SDK:

• A memory threshold can be used as a trigger to drop sounds based on priority.
• You can now be notified of the duration of a source that is about to play.
• You can now query using the Short ID.
• The performance of blend containers has been improved.
• The performance of the final mix job on the PLAYSTATION®3 has been improved.
• An integration demo is now available for the Wii™ and PLAYSTATION®3.