With the previous lesson on voice management, you’ve now learned how to control and optimize your audio in runtime. When you load a SoundBank into a scene, all the audio sources within will be fixed (the memory cannot be changed), and so this leaves you two ways of making variation. One is to have multiple variations of a sound, so the listener perceives each playing sound as different. Another is to apply Effects.

Applying an Effect means that the CPU processes an audio source during runtime. These modifications to the audio source only affect it at runtime and not the memory in the SoundBank, but they require a higher amount of processing power, and sometimes a fair amount of additional runtime memory. The resource usage of Effects varies greatly according to the type of Effect it is; but, generally, Wwise Compressor or Wwise Parametric EQ use considerably less than acoustic simulations like reverbs.