"Sound could not find a path to an output device, will use virtual voice setting." in Unity builds, but not Editor

Question

Hi there,

I was wondering if anyone else has run into this problem. I've found one similar question here, but the answer that was provided was not a fix for me.

I'm working in Unity 2017.1 and the latest version of Wwise. Everything works perfectly well in the editor, the soundbanks load, and I can hear all my events posted no problem. Then after building (and copying the soundbanks over to StreamingAssets) there is no sound, no errors, and when I connect the wwise profiler I am spammed with "Sound could not find a path to an output device, will use virtual voice setting." for every event that is posted.

I've tried re-integrating Wwise several times, and this never used to happen in older versions. If anyone has run into this issue and had it resolved before I would love to know how to fix it!

Thanks.

Comments

Same here. Works in the editor but no sound in the build. The profiler says "Sound could not find a path to an output device, will use virtual voice settings". I made sure that the AkAudioListener had a AkGameObj and that is was set as the default listener.

Don't know if this could be the cause but I'm making a Unity 2017.3 Vive game with Wwise 2017.2.1 64 bits.

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Hi there Clement, I found the answer to my issue a few days ago, posted the answer below. Hope that helps! I am also building for Vive so I have a feeling we were having the same problem.

Answer 1

Solved!

Looks like the issue isn't with Wwise at all but with SteamVR or OpenVR trying to dynamically reset my machine's audio devices on launch and exit. The fix for me was to (in Unity) go into Edit>Project Settings>Script Execution Order and make sure that AKInitializer was being executed before any SteamVR or OpenVR scripts. I also disabled my "Steam Ears" script that was attached to my head object, though I'm not positive that actually did anything to help. All of my builds after that seemed to work smoothly. I also found that in the SteamVR app if I set my desired audio output and input to be set on launch and exit, I could get my old builds to produce sound when they wouldn't before. Hope this helps anyone in a similar situation!

Comments

Hi Blake,

I tried what you suggested and unfortunately I still have the same problem.
I also have another Vive project on the same Unity version and same Wwise version that doesn't have that issue.
I'm trying to compare them one setting at a time but to no avail so far.

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Ok I found a way to get it to work.
In case someone else has a similar issue here's my setup.
I have multiple scenes that I load additively (one for the VR camera and stuff, one for gameplay and one for art).
The issue in my case was that the WwiseGlobal (AkTerminator and AkInitializer) was in the gameplay scene, with the soundbanks and sound events.
Once I moved the WwiseGlobal object in the VR camera scene (with the AkAudioListener) I got sound back in my builds.

The more you know... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Tiny rant: When unchecking the "Create Wwise Global game object" in the settings, you will never be able to have a game object called WwiseGlobal as it will automatically be deleted when coming back from play. If you do your own WwiseGlobal object (so one doesn't get added in every scene under the sun) you need to rename it to something like "CustomWwiseGlobal" so it can survive. This is so dumb.