Wwise Help

You can convert many audio files at once by right-clicking a high-level object in the hierarchy, such as a container, and then selecting Convert from the shortcut menu. If you want to set the Conversion Settings for an entire group of objects, you can right-click the top-level object and select Conversion Settings from the shortcut menu. You can also multi-select objects in the Project Explorer and then define their Conversion Settings or convert them all simultaneously.

Many times, when a studio develops a game, it examines each platform and then allocates a “budget” for such items as the memory footprint, CPU, and bandwidth. The audio team is given a portion of this budget and it is up to them to manage this budget efficiently for each platform. Depending on the platform, these allowances will be different, so the audio designer needs to understand how to efficiently compensate for these differences and still deliver great sound using the various Conversion Settings available. To see how well you are doing, you can monitor your project's performance in game using the Game Profiler, and adjust the Conversion Settings as needed to stay within your budget. The following sections look at how different settings can affect the sound designer's budget.

Audio formats must also be considered in your budget. It is useful to review the characteristics of the different formats supported by Wwise so that you can make good choices for your project. A general rule is that the less a file is compressed, the less processing power is needed; however, an uncompressed file usually uses more memory or disk space.

The following table provides you with some basic suggestions and information to help you decide how to encode your audio files.

File Format	Compression ratio (approx)	CPU	Memory	Examples of how these are commonly used	Limitations
PCM	1:1	Low	High	Sounds requiring high fidelity.	None.
ADPCM	4:1	Moderate	Moderate	Ambient sounds and SFX.	Looping on 64 sample boundaries only.
Vorbis	3-40:1	High	Moderate to very low	Dialogue, music, ambient sounds, and SFX.	Slightly larger metadata overhead than other formats, so you should avoid it with very small sounds (less than a few tens of milliseconds). Requires a seek table for seeking.
XMA	2-20:1	Low	Moderate to very low	Ambient sounds and SFX that do not require precise looping.	Large metadata overhead. Streamed sounds can only loop across whole files, and there may be gaps of silence at loop points. In-memory sounds support looping at 128 sample boundaries. Not appropriate for sample-accurate playback.
AAC	3-23:1	High (low when using hardware-assisted decoder on iOS)	Moderate to low	Background (not interactive) music.	Very large metadata overhead. Long setup time. Not appropriate for sample-accurate playback.
Opus	10-60:1	Very Low*	Moderate to very low	Dialogue, music, ambient sounds, and SFX.	Slightly larger metadata overhead than other formats, so you should avoid it with very small sounds (less than a few tens of milliseconds). *CPU Note Wwise currently only supports the Nintendo Switch version of Opus, which uses the Switch hardware. This gives a distinct CPU advantage. Note Opus is not currently available for use when developing with the Mac version of Wwise.

By default, the Vorbis encoder does not use a seek table in order to save disk space. You must, however, use a seek table in the following circumstances:

To enable the seek table for a selection of Vorbis encoded files, do the following:

Smaller seek table granularities require more memory. Sample-accurate seeking (interactive music or seek actions) may incur a CPU spike if granularity is too large, and inefficient I/O usage if it is larger than the disk streaming granularity. As a rule of thumb, pick a seek table size that is smaller or equal to your disk streaming granularity, which is the value used for AkDeviceSettings::uGranularity during initialization.