PS4 build on a PS5 causes sound to break

Question

I'm testing a PS4 build on a PS5 to check if everything works, but it somehow breaks all audio. It sounds as though the cpu has reached it's limit, or like when a DAW's buffer size is too small and everything becomes garbled nonsense.

A PS4 build with Wwise running on a PS5 can't be something THAT new, so there must be something I'm missing.

However, everything works fine in a PS5 build.

Has anyone else had this issue? It there some conversion step I'm missing?

Thanks in advance!

Comments

Have you tried connecting the Wwise profiler, to see if there are any problem in the capture log?

---

At the moment, I don't think I have a way to connect to the profiler from the PS5. Unless, is that something that's relatively easy to setup?

Answer 1

Other teams have reported this problem, we are investigating the root cause now. One team has been able to work around the issue by disabling Unreal Audio within the PS4 engine config file by adding this section:

[Audio]
AudioDeviceModuleName=
AudioMixerModuleName=

Comments

Hi Guillaume! Thanks for your reply.

Unfortunately we have this setting at the moment but are still having issues.

Hopefully this is something that can be fixed as we are unable to pass certification with Sony.

Thank you for your help!

Do let me know if there are any updates on this issue :)

---

Good day!

Has there been any solutions found for this? We also have these settings and are experiencing the issue (UE4.26.2 and Wwise 2021.1.3).

Thank you,
Brent Scriver

---

The root of the problem is in the PS5 system software, the fix for it is planned for SDK 5.00.

---

Excellent, thank you for letting us know!

Is there a ticket reference on the Sony side for this? We are re-certing for an update and this is failure criterion. A PS5 build won't be ready in time.

---

Hi!

We are still on the hook for fixing this unfortunately to be able to pass certification, so I thought I would share our solution as it wasn't pleasant. We were encountering this conflict with the PS4 Movie Streamer provided by Epic in Unreal.

The solution we went with was to move the core bit of Wwise initialization into a separate module of the Wwise plugin that could occur during preloading before the PS4 Movie Streamer, and have the PS4 Movie Streamer reference the plugin and trigger initialization of Wwise. None of the game logic was included in this. Some of the configuration logic had to be moved to a separate config class in the preloading plugin.

There were additional challenges to this that required some... inelegance as the editor builds use dlls and Wwise is statically linked so there was an instance of Wwise for both the preloading module and the standard AkAudio module and changes in one weren't reflected in the other (this is a non-issue for monolithic builds). So in this configuration we had a cpp file in AkAudio that #included the one from PreLoading and did the initialization in AkAudio calling into the function and disabled it in the Preloading module. There were extra steps on top of this to ensure no collisions with definitions for monolithic builds.

I also had to change some of the logic in the AkLEngine.cpp for PS4 to register a callback after init in CAkLEngine::Init to explicitly call GetSceAudio3dPortId() to make the call because it seems that call is normally deferred to when actual playback is first requested.

Also, sceAudio3dInitialize uses SCE_AUDIO3D_ERROR_NOT_READY for a second initialization, not SCE_AUDIO_OUT_ERROR_ALREADY_INIT.

The Sony tech note for reference is: https://p.siedev.net/technotes/view/382

Thank you,
Brent Scriver

---

We are having exactly the same issue. Please let us know if there's another work around the issue!