By default, Wwise provides a volume meter on the Master Audio Bus which appears in the Meter view to the right in the Designer layout and Mixer layout. While this gives you a sense of the final output volume when playing objects in Wwise, it would be helpful to have visual metering available for each of the busses in the Music Mixing Desk. You can see that the Wwise Audio Busses you’ve added to the Music Mixing Desk do not display meters. The reason for this is that in Wwise, Master-Mixer Hierarchy busses are handled under the hood as non-mixing busses, unless they need to be converted to a true mixing bus. Non-mixing busses propagate their properties such as the Voice Volume to the objects that are assigned to them, using the same inheritance approach used throughout Wwise. This approach is more efficient in its use of CPU and memory than if a true summing of the contributing signals was performed. Because there is no summed signal to meter, no meter can be displayed.

While this approach may be more efficient for CPU use at runtime, the need for metering the busses during the authoring process is also important. You can acquire a meter for an Audio Bus by forcing it to sum the audio signals that are contributing to it. There a few circumstances that will promote a non-mixing bus to a mixing bus. One of these circumstances is when an audio Effect is inserted across the Audio Bus. The plug-in that uses the least amount of CPU processes is the Wwise Gain plug-in, so inserting it into an Audio Bus is a way to get the meter you want with little impact on system performance.

	To learn more about the Processing Status of busses, refer to Understanding the Bus Icons and Processing Status in the Wwise Help.