Synchronized, spatialized Music Tracks within Music Segments

Question

I'm trying to play one big song but split out, individually, the stem tracks (single instruments: snare, kick, guitar) seperately into different areas of the game, I.e. you hear the kick drum on the right wall and the snare on the left wall and you can get closer to one, fly around one, and the volume/direction should change as if it were a regular emitter in the world. BUT i'm trying to do it with music, so synchronization is the most important thing. I'm assuming (possibly incorrectly) that "Music Segments" are the only gauranteed synchronization? Otherwise, I would just spawn the instruments as individual events.

I have "overriden parent" on the stem tracks (Music Tracks), but I don't know how to expose to Unity the abilitiy to dynamically position single tracks seperately from others in the same Segment.

I also want this to be a generalized solution, otherwise I would make unique RTPCs for each Track and split it out that way.

Maybe there is a way to gaurantee synchronized playback between multiple events/object outside of the music segment?

Any help/driection is appreciated.

Thanks!
-andy

Answer 1

Hi Andy,

Although it’s not officially supported by Wwise, there is at least one game I know that separated instruments into independent music switch containers that were triggered simultaneously from different events. Each event was played from a different game object which opened up the possibility of assigning different position and game parameter (RTPC) values. This system worked for them, but they took great care of having their content authored exactly the same in terms of segment durations, tempo and transition rules.

The other approach that’s probably simpler would be to insert your stems in the same segments, but route each music track to different busses (e.g. a bus for the drum, another for the bass, etc.). These busses positioning would be set to 2D and you would drive the X and Y positions with different game parameters (e.g. ‘Drum X Axis’, ‘Drum Y Axis’, ‘Bass X Axis’, ‘Bass Y Axis’, etc.). Set this way, it also becomes easy to set general rules per instrument for volume, LPF, effects, etc.

Hope this helps,

Simon

Comments

Hey Simon,

Is there any update to this system in the last 8 years? It seems you can really still only have one object attached to the event driving the music switch container, meaning one 3d position for stems outside of the hacky workarounds that you've mentioned. :/

- Felix