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Interactive Music Playback Tips & Best Practices

Interactive music is a complex tool with many options. Adopting a coherent strategy towards interactive music at the beginning of a project can save you time and effort later on. Of course, there are multiple ways to approach any interactive music project, and you can use Wwise in any way you see fit to create the best results for your game. The following are suggestions for how you can get the most from your interactive music including troubleshooting information for any playback problems that might arise.

Troubleshooting Playback

If you are having de-synchronization or voice starvation problems when auditioning tracks, and you are connected to the game you may want to set a new look-ahead time for music tracks in the Track Property Editor. If you are experiencing these problems in Wwise for unstreamed tracks, you could adjust the look-ahead time in Audio Preferences to prevent these problems. This value determines the default look-ahead time for these objects in Wwise. For more information about defining user preferences for look-ahead time, refer to Setting the Music Track Look-ahead Time.

As a general rule, the more tracks that you have playing simultaneously, the more look-ahead time you will need to avoid voice starvation and maintain track synchronization. The exact amount of look-ahead time will depend on many factors, including the compression format and the total bandwidth usage at the time of the request.

Ensuring Sample Accurate Conversion

The sample converter used in Wwise increases the length of a sound by approximately 12 samples per minute for sources in the following frequencies:

  • 44,100 Hz

  • 22,050 Hz

  • 11,025 Hz

Although this is not a problem for sound objects, music objects can stop at the exit marker and don't necessarily play to the end of the file, which can cause inconsistencies. It is a good idea, therefore, to use 12,000, 24,000, 36,000, or 48,000 Hz audio files for your music objects because these don't introduce any errors.


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