Unity is a popular game engine that offers a variety of tools and features for creating immersive and interactive games. One of these features is the audio source, which is a component that can play sounds and music in your game. In this article, you will learn how to use the audio source effectively to enhance your game's audio and sound programming.
An audio source is a component that you can attach to any game object in your scene. It allows you to play sounds and music from an audio clip, which is a file that contains the sound data. You can also control various aspects of the sound, such as volume, pitch, loop, spatial blend, and 3D sound settings. An audio source can also interact with other components, such as audio listeners, audio mixers, and audio filters.
In Unity, an audio source is your gateway to effective sound management. To quote Thomas Edison, "Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work." An audio source in Unity is like that opportunity; often overlooked, but vital. It emits sound, whether it's music, voice, or effects, enriching the gaming experience. Think of it as the workhorse, responsible for playing, pausing, and manipulating audio. Just as Edison valued the hard work behind opportunities, understanding and using the audio source effectively is the key to enhancing your game's auditory dimension. It transforms your game into a more immersive and engaging world, where every sound matters.
What is an audio source ?!! It's one of the Unity's components to add and control audio files which used in the game. like changing the volume, pitch, etc.
To add an audio source to your game object, you can either use the Add Component menu in the Inspector window or drag and drop an audio clip from the Project window onto the game object. In the Inspector window, you will find a variety of properties that you can adjust, such as Play On Awake, Loop, Mute, Volume, Pitch, Spatial Blend, and 3D Sound Settings. For example, Play On Awake allows you to automatically play the sound when the game starts; Loop enables repeating the sound until it is stopped or paused; Mute silences the audio source; Volume adjusts the loudness of the sound from 0 to 1; Pitch changes the speed and frequency of the sound from -3 to 3; Spatial Blend adjusts the blend between 2D and 3D sound from 0 to 1; and 3D Sound Settings define how the sound behaves in 3D space.
It's really simple, we just need to add it to any object we want then we can control it manually or via script. As far as i know the audio formats which unity supports are Mp3, Ogg, Wave. We just need to drag and drop the audio file in the component the it will be play any time we want.
To play an audio source, you can either use the Play button in the Inspector window, or use a script. Scripts can control the audio source through methods like Play(), Pause(), UnPause(), Stop(), and IsPlaying(). It is also possible to access or modify the audio source through properties like clip, time, timeSamples, volume, pitch, mute, and loop. This will enable you to control the playback position of the sound in seconds or samples as well as the volume, pitch, mute state, and loop state of the sound.
You can use multiple audio sources in your game to create different layers of sound, such as background music, sound effects, dialogue, and ambient sounds. You can assign different audio sources to different game objects, or use a single game object with multiple audio sources. You can also use audio mixers to group and mix multiple audio sources, and apply effects and transitions to them. Audio mixers are assets that you can create and edit in the Audio Mixer window. You can connect audio sources to audio mixers by using the Output property in the Inspector window.
Audio can have a major influence on the performance of your game, particularly if you use high-quality sounds, large audio clips, or numerous audio sources. To optimize audio performance, you can employ compressed audio formats such as MP3, OGG, or AAC instead of uncompressed formats like WAV or AIFF. Additionally, streaming for large audio clips such as music or dialogue can reduce memory usage and loading time. You can enable streaming by using the Load Type property in the Import Settings window. Moreover, you can adjust the quality and compression settings of your audio clips with the Audio Importer window. The Profiler window allows you to monitor the audio CPU usage and memory usage of your game, so you can detect any bottlenecks or issues. Finally, use the Audio Settings window to configure the global audio settings of your game, such as sample rate, DSP buffer size, spatializer plugin, and speaker mode.
It's a good idea to have a pool of audio sources available for you to use and recycle throughout the game, instead of instantiating or initializing new ones. This can help improve runtime performance, especially on audio-heavy games and on mobile platforms. Additionally, depending on their use case, each audio file should have different import settings, codec and "force to mono" are a good place to start. Refer to the unity docs for tips on how to choose a codec for your audio clip.
The audios we import in our projects have their own options. When we select the audio we can do some changes on it to make some optimizations, such as changing the quality to reduce the size or changing audio format, and also turning the audio to mono or stereo. Optimizing audio files in mobile games are more critical than the other platforms. Unity has 3 options for loading audio files which these names: 1-Decompress on Load, 2-Compressed in Memory and 3-Streaming. I usually prefer to use (Decompress on Load) option, because it uses less CPU usage than the others.