Low-level ticks audio artifacts during playback with Unity

Question

Hi all,

I'm a bit of a Wwise newbie so I'm hoping my issue is a minor one due to user-error that is easy to resolve.

I'm using a recent version of Wwise as the audio engine for a Unity 6 Quest-VR project. In the project I'm playing back a bunch of looping music stems (as SFX in the actor-mixer hierarchy) that are all 16bit, 48KHz mono wav files. I'm not binauralizing the audio, but am using 3D playback to get distance-based volume and panning. Output is set to headphones stereo. With Unity set to Windows build, I either play my project on a Meta Quest3 from Editor via Link-mode or do a Windows standalone build, and when I play the session I can hear very slight, low-level ticks in the audio playback. They sort of sound like sample rate mismatch ticks but I'm not sure that's the issue. In Unity/Windows I set my sample rate to 48KHz as well.

Maybe it's a gain staging issue where the ticks I'm hearing are slight ticks of clipping? I'm running the audio into a few different DSP FX (reverb, delay, low-pass) and controlling those params via RTPCs connected to the Quest controllers. It seems that Wwise doesn't have any metering to show levels of audio signal going in and out of FX that maybe I'm introducing clipping, heard as ticks? I do have a limiter on the master bus to clamp down on anything going over -1dB.

Anyway, interested to hear if anyone might have a solution or thoughts on how to best track down the issue. thanks!

Answer 1

While it's hard to tell what could cause the issue, Wwise does allow you to add a Meter effect instance between the effects to inspect the signal coming in and out of each effect. Note that this is much more useful starting with Wwise 2023.1, where the previous 4 effect slots per object limit was increased to 255.

You may try bypassing individual effects when connected to the game to find a culprit.