Myri Audio is a pure DOTS audio solution designed for handling a myriad of audio sources. It leverages the C# job system, the Burst compiler, and the DSPGraph. At the time of its latest release (when this page was last modified), no official Unity Entities-based audio solution exists.
Check out the Getting Started page!
Myri can play audio without requiring a single line of code. Simply add Myri Audio Source components to your Game Objects and a Myri Audio Listener Authoring to your camera transform and you are good to go. A brickwall limiter is applied to the final audio result so your audio can remain distortion-free no matter how chaotic your scene is.
Myri processes sound in 3D space in order to provide the listener a sense of directionality and immersion. While much simpler than the cutting-edge techniques used in VR applications, the model is customizable through a listener profile API. From 2D panning to up to 127 distinct direction channels, Myri can be tuned to meet your project’s needs.
The default profile produces a similar sound experience to the Megacity demo.
Myri can detect when several audio sources are playing the same clip in unison and combine them to save processing power without losing spatial information. This feature is in stark contrast to Unity’s FMOD implementation where sources are omitted when too many are played at once.
The mechanism Myri uses for this is inspired by the Megacity demo. But unlike the demo, Myri can also combine one-shot sources.
Voice-combining is automatic and requires no effort from the user.
Myri allows audio sources to define cone-shaped emitters. These can be used to emulate directional audio emitters such as loudspeakers.
Cone emitters are fully modifiable at runtime.
Myri has no synchronous dependencies and will not force any jobs to complete other than those it has scheduled in a previous update.
Most DSPGraph-based solutions schedule jobs from the mixer thread to perform intensive sampling. These jobs must compete for resources with jobs scheduled from the main thread, which can lead to frame-time inconsistencies for heavily jobified projects. Myri does not schedule jobs from the mixer thread. Instead, Myri schedules sampling jobs to execute during an ECS sync point, utilizing worker threads that would otherwise be idle. This essentially makes Myri’s sampling work “free”.
Warning: While this approach reduces frame times, it requires more computation effort. Consequently, it may not be well-suited for mobile platforms where battery life is a concern.
Myri aims to provide a simple, easy, and job-friendly API. Rather than using shared components or managed components, Myri uses blob assets to store sample data. You can easily query and assign clips to audio sources inside Bursted jobs.
Audio sources automatically begin playing as soon as Myri detects them. For those familiar with classical Unity terminology, audio sources always exhibit “Play on Awake” behavior. This means playing a one-shot is as simple as instantiating a prefab. You can even command Myri to automatically destroy the entity when the clip is done playing.
Yes. Multiple listeners are supported. Their outputs are automatically mixed together. I’m probably crazy for supporting this, but if this was a feature you were hoping for, well I’m glad I delivered.
- Myri may drop the first samples of a newly instantiated audio source if the audio framerate is faster than the simulation framerate. A configurable audio framerate multiplier exists to combat this, but issues may still arise during frame spikes.
- Myri will only use up to
nworker threads when performing sampling, wherenis the sum of spatialization channels across all listeners. A default listener has four spatialization channels.
The following issues are issues with Unity’s underlying DSPGraph and cannot be resolved in Myri. If you encounter one of these issues, submit a bug report to Unity!
- Background subscene baking crashes while reading the AudioClip assets on some systems.
- Sometimes in the editor, audio may stutter despite a lack of warnings of the DSPGraph being starved. This is because GC spikes stall the audio thread if Burst Compilation is disabled.
- A job which manages listeners and the DSP graph is not Bursted due to DSPGraph limitations.
- The Unity Editor sometimes emits an exception from a Bursted job. This is a DSPGraph and job system bug related to scheduling, and does not appear to have any adverse effects currently.
- Exiting play mode while an active listener exists will cause a warning regarding DSPGraph nodes not being disposed. This is an execution order issue on teardown.
- Clip compression for long clips in blobs
- Layers
- Custom sample generation API
- DSPGraph post-processing API
- Pitch shifting