Managing SoundBanks

To effectively manage the audio and/or motion components of a game, Wwise puts all the audio and motion for your game into SoundBanks. A SoundBank is basically a file that contains the audio and/or motion data, media, or both. These SoundBanks are loaded into a game's platform memory at a particular point in the game. By loading only what is necessary, you can optimize the amount of memory that is being used for media by each platform. SoundBanks are the product of all your work and contain the final content that becomes part of your game.

In Wwise, there are two types of banks:

Initialization (Init) bank - A special bank that contains all the general information about a project, including information on the Bus hierarchy, and information on States, Switches, and RTPCs. If applicable, it also includes Audio Device ShareSets.
The Initialization bank is automatically generated every time Wwise generates the SoundBanks. The Initialization bank is usually loaded once at the beginning of your game so that all the general project information is easily accessible during game play. It must be the first bank loaded when starting a game; otherwise, the other banks (Content) might not load. Its filename is "Init.bnk".
SoundBank - A file that contains a combination of Event data, sound, music, and motion structure data, and/or audio files. Unlike the Initialization bank, the SoundBanks are generally loaded and unloaded at different points in the game to better utilize platform memory usage.

Because all platforms are different, Wwise allows you to easily tailor the SoundBanks for each platform and generate the SoundBanks for all platforms simultaneously. Wwise also provides you with tools for troubleshooting any issues related to your SoundBanks to make sure that you are respecting the limitations of the different platforms.

You must use only one Wwise project per game. If you have several people working on a very large project, you can divide up a project into separate Work Units. For information on using Work Units, refer to Dividing your project into Work Units.

SoundBank views in Wwise

To help you work more efficiently, a SoundBank layout is available in Wwise. This layout contains all the views you need to create, manage, and generate the SoundBanks for your project, including the Project Explorer, Event Viewer, SoundBank Manager, SoundBank Editor, and either the Property Editor or Event Editor depending on the type of object selected.

	Tip
	By default in Wwise, you can switch to the SoundBank layout by pressing F7.

The SoundBank Editor is where you build your SoundBanks by adding different Events, sound, music, motion structures, and audio files to the SoundBank. You can open the SoundBank Editor by selecting a SoundBank in either the Project Explorer or SoundBank Manager.

The SoundBank Editor consists of the following four tabs:

Add - Displays only the actual Events, object hierarchies, Work Units, and folders, that were added to the SoundBank. Any corresponding child objects that are also automatically added to the SoundBank are only displayed on the Edit tab. On the Add tab, you determine what types of information and/or media are included in the SoundBank per hierarchical element.
Game Syncs - Displays a list of States, Switches, and Triggers related to the Events and sound structures that have been included on the Add tab. On this tab, you can exclude specific Game Syncs from a SoundBank. By excluding a Game Sync, you also exclude any related sound structures and media files.
Edit - Displays a detailed list of each individual Event, object structure, and media file, including all child objects, that are associated with the project elements on the Add tab. Additional information is displayed for the media files in the SoundBank, including the sample rate, audio format, and file size. By having this information available in this tab, you can easily tweak the Conversion Settings of each individual file to meet the constraints or limitations of a particular platform. You can filter the list by language and object type and then deselect any project elements that you want to exclude from the SoundBank.
Details - Displays detailed information about the size of the different elements within the selected SoundBank as well as reporting any files that might be missing or replaced.

At any point in the development of your project, you can generate your SoundBanks from the SoundBank Manager. The SoundBank Manager displays a list of user-defined SoundBanks and a list of auto-defined SoundBanks. Each list contains some basic information about the type and size of each SoundBank. The SoundBank Manager also includes a separate list of platforms and languages that, when selected, determines which SoundBanks will be generated.

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