Hey guys,
My game Midnight Racing is currently cursed when it comes to audio. I hate it but the truth is I have no idea how I can fix this. We have a ton of cars on a chassis that changes the pitch and volume of an audio as they drive, but having so many different engine sounds and people who are making the engine sounds quickly makes it easy to get sounds unbalanced. After the engine audio is super loud it makes it hard to gauge the actual volume of our menu music and stuff since (I think) Roblox or Windows auto balances audio to an extent.
I recently added a free model piano to the game as an interactable interior object, and much to my surprise when you played it in game you couldn’t hear it at all because the game is so loud that the ambience alone was able to drown out the sound of it. You have to play the game at volume level 1 and use your device’s audio settings to change the volume. It doesn’t help that we have a boombox gamepass so players can play any audio they want through the boombox and bypass super loud audios to blow out people’s ears.
I guess my quesion is, what API’s, tools, etc are there so I can properly gauge the audio of my game before release? Is there any way to view the decibel rating of an audio before it plays and equalize it accordingly? How I manage my game’s decibel rating to make it playable on all volume levels, and how can I keep bypassed loud audios from disrupting other player’s gameplay? Thanks!
I’m a music producer. My main tool for balancing audio, which in music would be called mixing, is Ableton Live. In any form of mixing, you would use what are called “Filters”, a type of cap on the audio that will determine the audios bass, treble, low, mid, or high ranges. The goal to a perfect mix is a perfect balance with the low and high ends of the music. The best way to implement this in a game is to extract your audio files and apply filters to them in some external software likeAudacity. For engine sounds, more bass and less high and mid end would give you a realistically mixed engine sound. Pianos typically like to stay in the mid ranges of the sound spectrum, where as tire screeches and the like are treble or higher ended. Doing this for each individual sound and reimporting in game will give a much clearer balance. You can also tweak volume, reverb , and dampness to each sound and achieve an even better mix. This is the best practice to sound mixing that’s applied all across the board from game development, Folley production, and music.
I appreciate the thought out post. I use FL Studio myself, but I didn’t really want to export and re import the sounds since I wanted to know what tools roblox had for balancing the audio volume. If you play the game, you’ll notice the piano is barely audible even though the piano and ambience are both volume 1. The issue is that the sounds were exported from their DAW with very different decibel levels. I’m looking for a way to automatically equalize those in roblox so they’re both audible (and not blasting ur ears out at volume 1). Something to hopefully mitigate bypassed audios in boomboxes and things as well.
Oh! I’m glad you understand filters and also produce! I guess you already found your answer. Varying decibels. As to what tools roblox itself has, idk. Many of them probably are not as reliable as FL, but I’ll look around. Also adding filters will prevent leaking into other ranges giving an illusion of loudness because sounds will collide.
I know this is super late but if anybody else is looking, you could change the volume of a sound based on the sound’s PlaybackLoudness, which is the actual volume of a sound in a game. You could make a new volume by dividing the default volume by the playbackloudness or something, but I don’t know for sure
I guess you already found your answer. Varying decibels. As to what tools roblox itself has, idk. Many of them probably are not as reliable as FL, but I’ll look around. Also adding filters will prevent leaking into other ranges giving an illusion of loudness because sounds will collide.