Lesson 7

Table of Contents

Assigning Conversion Settings

Now that you have a Conversion Settings ShareSet for your project, you can assign it to objects in your project hierarchy. The assignment of Conversion Settings ShareSets, like other object properties, are inherited from parent to child. This means that if you assign a Conversion Settings ShareSet to an Actor-Mixer, all containers and objects below it will automatically use the same ShareSet.

  1. Switch to the Designer layout and in the Project Explorer, click the Audio tab and select the Magic Actor-Mixer.

  2. In the Property Editor, select the Conversion tab.

    In the Conversion Settings group, by default for all new objects, the Mode is set to Use ShareSets. We'll leave it at this setting since you have just created a ShareSet you will make use of.

    [Note]

    The Define Custom mode is used when you want to apply a unique Conversion Setting for which you do not have a ShareSet.

  3. Click the [>>] selector to reveal the list of the ShareSets you created and select Default Work Unit > SFX.

    Now you need to adjust the conversion parameters of this SFX Conversion ShareSet.

  4. Click Edit to the right of the SFX ShareSet.

    The Conversion Settings Editor opens. The upper part of the window shows conversion parameters that are applied to any objects assigned to this ShareSet. The lower part of the window displays a list of the objects currently assigned to the ShareSet along with details about the audio files, such as how many channels they are, their sample rate, and most importantly their original file size.

    Notice that the Audio Source names appear in blue and their Converted Size column value is empty. This is because the conversion process has not yet been applied to these files.

    [Note]

    If you don’t see the Audio Source names in the far-left column, you can expand that column’s width by dragging the right edge of that column header.

    There are a variety of conversion processes that can be applied to an audio file to help reduce its size. Converting stereo channels to mono or lowering the sample rate can help to reduce file size but can also create obvious changes in how the audio sounds.

    Another option is to change the format. By default, audio imported into Wwise is typically a PCM file, which means that there has been no data compression applied to the file. Data compression, like that used with MP3 files, can greatly reduce a file’s size, and depending on how it is applied, may be barely noticeable. While Wwise does not provide MP3 compression as an option, it does provide Vorbis compression, which is very similar, and many would argue sounds better and has become a standard in game audio integration. The one consideration is that if a file is compressed, then the game system must decompress it to play it, putting an additional load on the system’s processor. This is where you must take into account the benefits of file size vs. processor usage. In this case you’ll go ahead and use Vorbis compression.

  5. Click the Format drop-down menu for both the Windows and Mac formats and select Vorbis.

    The Audio Sources turn blue indicating that they have yet to be converted to your newly selected Conversion Setting.

    A Quality property value, which is specific to the Vorbis option, is displayed. This represents the quality of sound that will result after the Vorbis conversion on a scale from -2 to 10 with -2 being lowest. While higher values represent better sound quality, it also means less data reduction will occur. A value of 4 is a good starting point because it dramatically reduces file size while providing acceptable sound in most situations.

    You’ll now need to apply the setting.

  6. Click Convert to apply the Conversion Settings.

    [Note]

    Generating a SoundBank also applies the Conversion Settings.

    The Audio File Conversion dialog box opens verifying which game system platforms you want to apply.

  7. Choose the option appropriate for your system and then click Convert.

    After a brief bit of processing, the audio filenames in the file list change to white, indicating that they have all been converted. You can now also see the converted file size. The Vorbis conversion has reduced most file sizes by 70-80%, a huge savings in space.

    To see how this impacts your memory budget for your Main SoundBank, you need to generate the SoundBank.

  8. Close the Conversion Settings window, then go back to the SoundBank layout and click Generate All.

    You can see that the Main SoundBank meets the memory budget; however, the DCP_the_core SoundBank is still way over budget. You’ll address this later.

    [Note]

    After you have created the Conversion Settings ShareSets for your project, you can specify which one you want to use as the default. The default Conversion Settings ShareSet is used when a new object is created, but will only be used if the new object is a top-level parent object. If the object has a parent, it will inherit the parent’s Conversion Settings. If an object has not been assigned a Conversion Settings ShareSet, the default ShareSet will be used to convert the object when the SoundBanks are generated. The default ShareSet is assigned in the Source Settings tab of the Project Settings.


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