Can I put a request in to allow us to use the GetConnectedWires(pin) method on some of these Sound Instances. Currently it is locked behind Plugin security
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I want to bump this because allowing Volumetric audio to work with objects holding AudioEmitters would be powerful.
I want to have nice ambience for a stream of water in my game, but with AudioEmitters it’s not possible unless I make a ton of them. And I, of course, want to begin using this new API - but this is still something old sounds have over the new API.
Combining these two features would be amazing.
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For those that need help:
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Would be cool if there was an instance or function to specifically translate voice to a string, AI seems to be a high priority for Roblox so it’d fit in nicely. This would open the door to many new games, games like Phasmophobia listen to your voice calling out the ghosts’ names to trigger events, something currently not possible on Roblox.
Hi, does this place have AmbientReverb set on the SoundService? Does this bug happen if you set it to NoReverb?
When you say “overtime”, you mean that this doesn’t happen right away, but you have to wait a while? After how long does this happen?
Does this happen for AudioPlayers as well, or just for AudioDeviceInputs?
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The place does make use the AmbientReverb property in SoundService.
By default it is set to City and is set to UnderWater when under water.
and I haven’t used any AudioPlayers in my place, I just only have the beta feature enabled.
By overtime I mean it doesn’t happen right away – it just happens at random after being around someone using spatial voice chat.
I’ll try setting to NoReverb and I’ll let you know if the bug still happens or not.
EDIT: I believe setting the AmbientReverb to NoReverb fixes this bug.
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Same, also need this. It kinda feels like they’re gonna be leaving it out due to the lack of response on this.
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We believe that would be important
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Hey! You probably have been busy but is there any update on the situation? Thanks in advance!
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Yo, epic! Thanks a lot for hearing me out, I appreciate it! 
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How long is this going to stay disabled?
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Could we also get an AudioPlayer.Stopped event? Sound has this and I use it to delete the sound when it’s stopped.
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My feedback on the new API
*I’m open to alternative solutions: I focus on issues here, not solutions.
So starting thoughts: It’s so powerful and it’s so damn awesome. What isn’t provided I can typically implement myself, and I have designed a powerful system around the new audio API in my game. I’ve spent the past 5 days or so working with the audio API and I would like to share my thoughts on it here, because there were some pain points.
Some beliefs I will be holding onto for this post. If you don’t want to read this preface, just skim over the bold parts.
- Audio needs to be performant. This is because most interactions with audio happen very frequently. Either per frame, or every time a sound effect plays (very frequently), or every frame while a sound effect is playing. Go below “every frame” and you will hear issues (trust me, I tried). Performance is especially important when you’re targeting mobile users, or even desktop users. Because Bloxstrap is popular now, a very sizeable chunk of users expect your game to run above 60fps, sometimes even above 144fps. There have been multiple days in my games where I have seen analytics that show the average FPS to be higher than 60, which, for me, means that the demand for performance nowadays is higher than ever.
- I don’t want to fight the audio API to perfect my sound design. By “fight” I mean implement features myself in hacky ways. For example, I disable rolloff while keeping directional audio by creating an attachment positioned exactly 5 studs away from the camera in the direction that the source part is in. This lets have directional audio with no rolloff. It’s obvious that having to do this to get the sound I want for my game isn’t great developer experience.
Issue 1: Disabling/enabling effects
Often times I will want to create “effect pipelines” where I might dynamically apply reverb or a muffling effect to someone’s voice. This is possible to do, but there’s a problem: I need to re-map my Wire instances every single time in order to enable/disable effects! This is pretty annoying to implement, and it really sucks for performance.
My proposed solution is to create an Enabled property on every single effect, and if the effect is not enabled, it will pass through the wires anyway.
Issue #2: Debugging wire connections
It is really hard to debug the new audio API.
I’ll just put it in a nice list:
- No way to get connected wires from an effect. *Solved in version 618, props: New Audio API [Beta]: Elevate Sound and Voice in Your Experiences - #314 by ReallyLongArms
- It appears that setting the connected instance on a wire doesn’t make that instance forget which wire is connected, sometimes leading to a “recursive” error? I am not sure. I don’t even know how to repro because I can’t see what’s happening
- The above consistently makes instance caching with wires not possible. I will try to get a minimum repro, but it looks to be inconsistent and I am not even sure if it’s an issue on your end… it would be nice if I could get an answer from an engineer, as it is a big pain point.
Issue #3: Lack of rolloff options on AudioEmitters
There’s no way to customize anything related to rolloff on AudioEmitters. This is not good! My “wishlist”:
- I want to be able to completely disable the default rolloff, effectively using AudioEmitters for directional audio.
- The old API on Sounds would be nice, with options like RolloffStart, RolloffEnd, and RolloffMode. However please please please just have RolloffEnabled too! I understand that “it should be done for you” but if I want to disable rolloff I can already (and I do, at least in my proximity vc test), it’s just harder. This new audio API lets me “customize” rolloff as much as I want already.
Issue #4: AudioEmitters do not support volumetric audio
Self explanatory, I’m guessing this is being worked on already, but if it hasn’t been brought up already, it is an issue. Ideally we could toggle volumetric audio per emitter 
Issue #5: New effects / making existing effects more powerful
- The ability to pan audio
- Multiple sidechain pins on AudioCompressors. Probably a bad idea to just have like, 3, but my use case is having multiple ambient noises as the sidechain. Perhaps I’m misunderstanding how AudioCompressor is meant to be used…? I don’t know.
-
AudioFader.Volumeis capped to 3. This isn’t enough, sometimes the sound assets provided to me are super quiet, and I need to yank up the volume by 5x. More on that in another section though
Issue #6: AudioPlayer cannot “stack” sounds
If I have a sound effect that lasts for 0.5 seconds, and I play it every .15 seconds, it will cut off the sound every time I use :Play(). Sure, that’s fine. That’s expected and good behavior.
The problem is if I want the old audio track to keep playing, I need to duplicate the AudioPlayer and I need to duplicate the wire(s). This is problematic if I have a lot of AudioEffects chained with the AudioPlayer, because I need to duplicate many wires, which is really bad for performance. Especially because I can’t use instance caching!
Proposed solution: Perhaps some :PlayNew() could be added? AudioPlayers have the potential to massively save on memory, this problem is the only thing holding that back. However, I have noticed memory savings for sound effects which only get played once. The granular control over if the asset is loaded is also really really nice, and I love that. Being able to tell a client to pre-load map-specific audio assets, dynamically loading/unloading audio assets based on the current needs of the game…
Issue #7: AudioPlayer has no .Volume
While you can use an AudioFader instance to yank up the volume, this is a headache to manage because it means double the wires. Especially when stacked (pun intended) with the previous issue, it means I have to clone and destroy a lot of instances to play my sound effects.
Issue #8: AudioAnalyzer is not “good” enough to use.
(keep in mind I am mainly talking using :GetSpectrum() which is disabled atm
So to preface, I am not saying it’s not powerful. I am not saying it’s not performant. It is very powerful, and the instance itself is fine. The problem is in order to do anything with this, you need to do massive number crunching on the Luau side, which kills your performance.
Proposed solution: This can be done on the C++ side! The Blazingly Fast™ side. I would like if the common use cases for AudioAnalyzer could be exposed as read-only properties: perhaps, CurrentVolume, LoudestFrequency.
Thanks for reading this. Hope these issues can be fixed!
edit: I am bad at remembering to proofread
edit: clarified emitters not supporting volumetric audio
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Hey @ffrostfall, great and detailed feedback – thank you!
I need to re-map my Wire instances every single time in order to enable/disable effects!
I can see how this is cumbersome; we’ll discuss
There’s no way to customize anything related to rolloff on AudioEmitters
This is being actively worked on!
- Multiple sidechain pins on AudioCompressors
You should be able to wire multiple things to the same sidechain pin; it will mix them and use the total as the sidechain – does that work for your use-case?
AudioPlayer cannot “stack” sounds
We probably will not add this – in the past, we’ve implemented systems like Sound.PlayOnRemove and SoundService:PlayLocalSound that, internally, create a copy of the underlying sound, and play that to completion, without creating an instance.
These are a headache to maintain and debug: the playback state of the copy is nowhere to be found (since there is no instance reflecting it), which makes it difficult to control. We’ve also found that these APIs are not significantly more efficient than spawning a new local Sound and playing that; so it doesn’t seem worth the trouble.
I would like if the common use cases for AudioAnalyzer could be exposed as read-only properties: perhaps,
CurrentVolume,LoudestFrequency.
I think you might be able to use PeakLevel or RmsLevel as a substitute for CurrentVolume, but we can discuss LoudestFrequency
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Hi, with version 618 released the GetConnectedWires() function works now. So that great, but it takes a parameter called “pin”. I was wondering if you could help explain that to me. Thanks a lot. 
I tried this myself. I think I may have to re-check my code now 
When I tried to use AudioCompressors with multiple sidechain pins, it appeared like one audio track was overriding the others. I’ll double check
That’s unfortunate but understandable. Perhaps what could be done is allow the “grouping” of audio tracks? That way I can duplicate an AudioPlayer but not have to duplicate any other instance. This would still retain a lot of benefits like usability, and maybe even have other use cases, without creating the problem you described.
The documentation for these AudioAnalyzer properties specify “last audio buffer”. This indicates (to me at least) that it’s analyzing a set period of time, say .1 seconds of data before the current frame.
I’ll try it out? My underlying use case here is voice activity; but it felt like these properties had some level of “delay”. Maybe it was placebo, but if not, perhaps the buffer size could be adjustable?
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@ReallyLongArms
Will we be seeing updates to the EQ eventually? One of my major gripes at the moment with the audio engine as a whole. An essential item in a sound designers kit. It would open up many opportunities for sound design in engine without having to call for 30+ voices to achieve a similar effect.
What are the dB/oct slopes right now for the EQ curves?
Will we ever get a parametric EQ for audio emitters or master fader channels?
Will we get more control over the 3-Band EQ? I notice the mid band has control over max and min, but why not add control for the low end and high end? Change slope types (High Shelf, Low Pass, High Pass, etc.)? Steepness (6dB/Oct, 12, 24, 32, maybe even 48?).
This would allow for MUCH better control and frankly, it would make it more fun to work with the engine. Currently, audio inside the engine is VERY custom orientated (and annoying sometimes) to manage a large amounts of variations/sound instances and voices.
Will there be audio debugging tools in the future? View voice count or CPU draw/memory usage from FMOD?
As a sound designer, this update was a massive improvement and I’m happy to see the updates as we go through the paces. I’d really like to see some more individual control in the future. Not restrictive due to simplicity, real control.
Cheers,
Panzerv1 (Max)
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This is all amazing but how does one use this system to have global sounds such as ambience? If i want a sound at a constant volume throughout the entire workspace do I just need to use the original sound instance?
1 Like