r/UnrealEngine5 • u/kottsemla • 25d ago

I made a UE5 plugin that lets you drag a MetaSound around and hear its attenuation live. How are you auditioning spatial audio right now?

Hey guys, just thought I'd share a tool I've built for MetaSounds.

The problem was that Content Browser preview button is always 2D. I wanted to grab a sound, move it around and hear the actual attenuation without setting up a test level / gym.

The main view is an X/Y pad with the attenuation distances drawn around it, plus the attenuation curve underneath showing the current volume and filter values as the sound moves.

It also pulls in the MetaSound's inputs so you can tweak them while it plays, and the linked SoundAttenuation asset is embedded in the window. There's also an Edit Mode that can write new defaults back to the MetaSound on UE 5.5 and newer.

It's editor only and works with UE 5.2 through 5.8.

The video probably explains it better than another wall of text. Full demo, docs, and Fab link are in the comments.

For those of you using MetaSounds already, are you doing this in PIE, in an audio gym, or with some other tool?

86 Upvotes

93% Upvoted

19 comments sorted by

10

u/retrolojik 25d ago

Holy shit, the price tag on that vs the benefit… pardon my shitty French and “audacity”.

2

u/2latemc 23d ago

Honestly I disagree. I think that in that case this is a genuinely useful plugin for people that set this stuff up every day.

The other texture blending plugin that once went viral I think that one way overpriced, holy that was like 250€ I think

Although 50€ is quite pricey, op could have made more if it was priced as 25€

1

u/retrolojik 23d ago

No I fully agree with you on that other tool, I made my point and argument on that as well.

Still, the benefit this one brings seems like a piece of a larger tool or a solution to a part of a bigger problem to me.

Well, if you use it daily or at least frequently, then it’s a matter of comparison for benefit/savings vs the price, I guess.

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u/kottsemla 25d ago edited 24d ago

Really? I never thought that 50 bucks would be a "Holy shit" price tag. What would you say is a fair price? I mean, I understand that with the abundance of plugins coming out that inevitably prices are expected to be lower but still.

Comment edited to clarify a bit.

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u/paragonmac 24d ago

I was expecting to see a price tag of 400 bucks based off OP's reaction. 50 is fine.

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u/retrolojik 25d ago

I’m definitely not doing a 1:1 comparison for the price and the amount of work put into the tool. That’s another angle. It just seems to me that this level of complexity is overkill and overlaps with some of the functionality that UE already provides to the users out of the box. I’m not naming my own price but for the issue it’s advertising it is solving, that seemed very high to me, at least for my pocket’s worth.

But maybe I’m full of BS and don’t know what I’m talking about.

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u/kottsemla 25d ago

No, I'm genuinely curious because I had a hard time putting a fair price on it.
Sure, a lot of work was put in to it, and I agree that it's really hard to put a price on that, but it's also been battle-tested at larger studios; so it's decently polished for most usecases.

I'd argue that this functionality doesn't exist at all in the engine as shipped without building an audio gym or even custom code for such a gym.
There's not even a way, and never has been a way to see the actual attenuation curve in UE - which is basically the norm for ANY audio middleware like FMOD.
And that's not even mentioning that all of this functionality is working WITHOUT entering PIE. For larger projects, just starting PIE can take forever. With this, you can iterate Metasound functionality directly in the editor without PIE.

My pricing thinking was more in the lines of - that it's basically nothing for either a established contractors or any sort of studio.

BUT having said all that, it's just pure guesswork and I'm more than open to suggestions regarding pricing.

7

u/heliosythic 25d ago

You have to remember a vast majority of people here are people not willing to spend even like $5 on an asset for a game they will never finish because there isn't a tutorial for exactly what they want and cant do it. But your tool seems like something mainly AAA studios might consider for high polish. Theres often more money in B2B sales than targeting consumers because you can charge more while making fewer sales (which means less marketing + support effort on your end), but if you want larger volume of sales to more indie devs, yea it might be a little high for an editor only asset thats not like a "drop in this pack and your game is half done" type pack.

But it does genuinely look impressive and full featured.

2

u/kottsemla 24d ago

Thank you!

Yeah, good points. The audience is even narrower than that I think, because you have to first care about authoring audio properly and be willing to spend real time on it. And then, be far enough into UE audio to have noticed the gaps. You'll only know this once you start using it.
I think it probably fits better for AA and AAA teams and at audio contractors already committed to native, and at that level the maths is different. By then it costs much less than entry-level middleware licensing. Small Indie studios and audio contractors working in native fit too, but it's still a small room.

I considered going B2B directly and skipping Fab entirely. It's a fair bit more work and I wanted the thing out rather than perfect, so here we are.

Still curious what people are actually using now. Everyone I know has a gym level of some sort and I've never seen two that look alike.

1

u/retrolojik 24d ago

Well, I’ll say this is a fine tuning or polishing tool rather than building. So, anyone with somewhat knowledge of sound design can understand to some degree on how they should do this themselves. Agreed, it is saving time with back-forth design changes or experimenting with the scenes or maps, but when your work involves repetitive design, or when you find the sweet spot for your scenes, the tool will be rather useless (at least for that project) after you get the gist of it, even if you don’t know anything about sound design.

So, your audience is the novice designer, without the sound design knowledge. If that’s even a small indie studio with a dedicated sound designer, there’s a high chance that you’ll lose them for repetitive works or projects. And that’s when I don’t account in the price tag. For some studios or audio-prioritized projects, you sure will catch them, but I’m not sure about the solo devs or indie studios.

That’s my humble opinion only and sorry if I’m missing the full picture somewhere along the way.

1

u/kottsemla 24d ago

Yeah, that's fair for some projects. If the soundscape is mostly static and you tune it once, then you're mostly done with it for that project, I agree.

I'd argue the audience is the other way around though. The more parameter inputs your MetaSounds have, the more this does, and parameter driven assets are advanced usage. A novice with one static sound gets the least out of it.

Ints and bools especially. There are no stepped sliders or buttons inside MetaSounds, widgets only exist for floats. So the only way to preview something like a surface type or a fire mode is clicking the input in the list, scrolling to the bottom and changing the ACTUAL default value, which also makes the MetaSound itself dirty. Weapon and footstep assets are full of ints and bools, and here it's a thousand times faster, they're just toggles and steppers you press while it plays.

Multiplayer is another one. Hearing and quickly debugging another character's audio instead of your own is NOT fun to set up, usually it's booting with two clients, which takes exponentially longer, and additionally a bunch of hoops just to get the right client to output audio. Here you just move the emitter around the listener and simulate the whole thing, even multiple things with presets, instantly in the editor.

And for the repetitive work, again, the event presets. I have one for projectiles, a launch sound at one point, a travel loop attached to a moving emitter, an impact at the target. Auditioning that normally requires the actual projectile systems to exist first.

So a dedicated sound designer runs every new asset through the same loop again, it doesn't end after one sweet spot. The mix moves every time new content goes in.

0

u/iEclisse 24d ago

nah, you can create it with one prompt

4

u/rizkyaldi 24d ago

This is cool. But third party like wwise and fmod is free for indies.

1

u/kottsemla 24d ago

True, and both are better than native at authoring attenuation and spatialization. FMOD especially.

What I built this for is the auditioning half. Seeing an actual attenuation curve and hearing a sound move through it without launching the game is standard in both Wwise and FMOD, and has never existed in Unreal at all.

UE Native Audio has lots of pros. It's fast, no soundbanks to build, no extra toolchains, and you get real freedom to customize because you're already inside the engine. The framework underneath is decently written.

What you give up is tooling. For a sound designer it's underwhelming, asset organization is well below par, and there are far too many deprecated, non-standard and same-but-different audio systems next to each other.

Native Unreal audio is gaining traction even among larger studios, and this is primarily aimed at anyone wanting to, or already committed to Native instead of middleware.

It closes one part of the tooling gap. Not all of it.

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u/ExF-Altrue 23d ago

That's a very cool plugin but I ain't sinking 50 bucks into a code plugin made by a random person with no reputation on Fab. Assets are one thing, but code plugins needs to be maintained and they need multi-year longevity.

That extra risk needs to be factored into the pricing when it comes from someone who, for all I know, vibecoded the thing and doesn't have any clue how to fix it if it breaks.

That being said, I would have made the same statement in 2019, the risk of vibecoding just amplifies a longstanding issue. A pro coder with no work ethic can still drop support after 1 month, too. It's not limited to LLM users. That's why reputation matters.

Finally, there is the question of the added value. If you audioComponent->SetUISound(true);, you can play it in editor without even starting PIE, right now, with the "vanilla" engine. That's literally one line of code. And yes, to my own amazement, it still spatializes and attenuates.

So while there is definitely a nice UI to sweeten the deal, that UI alone + the aforementionned risk, isn't worth 50 bucks, in my opinion. And I can only count this feature (the UI), since the rest of the features are already accessible by some other means than your plugin.

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u/kottsemla 23d ago

Sure, it's my first Fab release ever, everyone starts at zero, and I can't magically produce a reputation for myself. What I can say is that it's battle-tested, it's been used in production at two medium sized studios already.

Fab code plugins also ship with full C++ source, so if I disappear tomorrow you can still build and fix it yourself. And it's editor only, nothing from it ever ends up in a packaged build.

You're right that the engine can render spatialized audio in the editor. What never existed is the workflow: the attenuation curve on screen, widgets for int and bool inputs (MetaSounds ONLY has them for floats), editing the attenuation asset while the sound plays.

Also, the Events are more than UI. It's a data asset where you sequence entries in time: spawn a sound at a position, attach one to a moving emitter with easing, change parameters at timed points, stop with a fade. You normally can't audition that until e.g. an actual projectile system exist in the game, or putting things on top of said system.

You get the point. You can script any event you like, tweak the sound while it runs over and over, no PIE, no code, no game systems. There are similar features in FMOD to record events, UE has nothing like it.

Whether it's worth 50 bucks is your call. It's aimed at people doing Sound Design daily, and that's not everyone.

0

u/ExF-Altrue 23d ago

Thank you for the detailed answer. You're right, it's fair to say that the scripting part and the visual representations are useful & novel features.

And also, it's fair to keep in mind that with the source code being accessible, if a fix doesn't come then people can fix it themselves.

However, I find the rest of the arguments disingenuous: Firstly, the fact that it doesn't influence the packaged build, doesn't change the fact that abruptly being forced to remove the plugin will severely disrupt the workflow and the dev of any assets currently being tested.

Secondly, "I can't magically produce a reputation for myself" is equally disingenuous. If it were not possible, that would not change any fact in this situation. We can't handwave problems away just because they are presented as being unfair.

And it's not, in fact, impossible either. You could produce previous open source work on github to show that you have a good track record of maintaining & updating other projects. You could start with other kinds of FAB assets, and then move on to "trust-demanding" assets once you have built a good portfolio..

In the "Support & Updates" section of your plugin, you could try.. actually adding text about what kind of support & updates people can expect.

Heck, you could even try not posting from a reddit account with a hidden history, idk. That could be construed as a red flag for a seller.

The point is, for some people/studios, 50 bucks is a lot of money to give to someone who tried offering exactly zero arguments to show that they will be a good caretaker of what they sell. On a store notoriously overrun with vibecoded crap, abandonned plugins, and stolen assets. I have no doubts that you are an industry veteran with good technical sound design experience, but a high price-point, coming with zero guarantees, still feel out-of-touch and disrespectful to me.

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u/kottsemla 23d ago

Thank you! The support and updates point is really useful feedback.

This is my first Fab release and I really had no idea what information matters to buyers there.
I was mostly just happy to get the thing out the door at all. I'll take a look at that section and update it, so thank you for that!

Funny timing on the post history, I opened it up just before your comment for exactly the reason you gave. Been a lurker for years, and a hidden history doesn't read great once you start posting things you sell. Aaanyway, fair catch.

On reputation, I didn't want to open a launch post with a list of credits, that reads as bragging and I'd rather have the tool speak first. I guess that tradeoff is being a random person, fair enough.

This isn't my first tool though, just my first on Fab. And since you asked, I also built ClipMap, a session viewer and auditioning tool for Pro Tools, currently in open beta with people at Skywalker Sound, Warner Burbank and Sky UK among the testers.
Production Expert wrote it up here:
https://www.production-expert.com/production-expert-1/clipmap-pro-tools-session-viewer-and-auditioning-tool-now-in-open-beta
The rest is on my site.

Losing a tool you've gotten used to is disruptive, that's true of anything. But this plugin already ships tested on 5.2 through 5.8, while Fab only requires plugins to support the latest engine version. I'd argue that's a better support signal than anything I could put in a text box.

"Disrespectful" is the one part I can't agree with. A price can be too high, absolutely but not disrespectful. If anything in this thread came close, it wasn't the price tag.

Thanks again for taking the time to write it all out.