I tried out the test scene included in the Oculus VR Audio SDK (with a Vive, not a Rift yet) and the audio in the test scene with the two spheres is all crackly. Especially the singing. The positional stuff works great, though. But as the audio plays you hear all kinds of crackles and pops.
I set the project's audio settings as specified in the documentation--is there perhaps some incompatibility with Oculus VR Audio SDK and Unity 5.4b1
Thanks for testing out our native Unity spatializer. I tried it in 5.4b1 and I am not hearing any cracking in the output.
Are you using the latest version of our SDK (1.0.2)? Does the cracking exist when you run it in the editor, standalone or both? Do you hear crackling when you use it without being connected to VR gear (i.e. run the test sample as-is without being VR enabled)?
If you have any more information that you can share with us to try to repro the problem here that would be great.
So, the test scene works fine in 5.4b1, and 5.4b5 (which I recently upgraded to) but in my actual game, I get a lot of crackles even weird doppler effects when using spatialized audio sources. I tried disabling the spatialization on all idle audio sources until I play them to no avail.
Should spatialized audio files be authored a certain way? Or is there a limit to how many simultaneous spatialized sounds you can play without getting all these crackles?
I haven't profiled the scene yet--but it is dropping frames pretty heavily since I added the positional audio. Would a drop in frame rate cause crackles and sound artifacts?
It depends on how many spatialized sources you are playing and if those sources are going through early reflections. CPU usage can add up very quickly if you are not careful; for example, larger room sizes with reverberation on will almost certainly saturate the audio CPU when you have a lot of voices.
I would try turning early reflections off globally (found in the mixer bus plugin) and see if that reduces the audio CPU usage. Profiling audio will give you a good idea of how much the CPU is being used in your game.
btw I recommend sticking to the release versions of Unity. I am hearing some issues with 5.40b4 in the test scene when using best latency, but this does not occur in 5.3.1p3 (the most recent public release I am using).
I can't use the release version of unity because there are too many lighting bugs in 5.3 -- such is the rolling disaster that is Unity 5. But I'll definitely turn off early reflections.
BTW what do you consider a "big" room size?
Is there a way to turn off reflections (not just early reflections) globally? Seems like you should add that to the mixer. It's really hard to turn off all the sound sources reflections individually when testing for performance--specially since it doesn't support multi-editing.
I would consider a big room size to be anything larger then 50x50x50 meters. Once you go past that size you will start seeing a noticeable difference in CPU cost. You can do this in real-time through the mixer bus settings and watch the Audio profiler DSP time creep up as you increase room size.
When we talk about reflections, we mean both early reflections and late reflections (reverb). The mixer plugin has a check box for both. However, Early Refl. On when unchecked, globally disables the reflections as well as reverberation for all spatialized sounds. That way you don't need to worry about checking Disable Reflections off for each sound.
