FAQ

Frequently asked questions about Sonity

Support and Contact

If you need support you can join the Sonity discord server and ask me for help or send me an email. You can also contact me if you need a special or bulk license or have questions about licencing. Discord - https://sonigon.com/sonity-discord/ Email - [e-mail]

Sonity Splash Screen for your Game

You're very welcome to include Sontiy splash screens or credits in your game if you'd want!

High Resolution Sonity Logos:

• Logo with Dark Background: Dropbox Link Use if the background is too bright, looks good in all settings

• Transparent Background: Dropbox Link If you have a compatible background color

Supported Versions

Sonity is fully supported and tested on Unity 6, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019 with IL2CPP. Unity 2018.3.0 or newer: Everything works except “Debug SoundEvents Live (In Scene View)” and Terrain example. Minor GUI tweaks for compatibility. The asset store “supported version” field is bugged which I’ve reported to Unity.

WebGL

Everything in Sonity works except DSP (distortion/lowpass/highpass).

Free Trial Version

There is now a free trial version! https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/audio/sonity-audio-middleware-free-trial-244369 It supports all features except those which use script define symbols (because .dll's don't support conditional compilation).

Sales / Deals / Discounts

I can't choose when Sonity on the Unity Assetstore has a sale, I can only accept when they email me if I want to join a certain sale period. This is the type of of emails which are sent to me with discount offers:

EULA, Licencing and Seats

Sonity uses the standard Unity Asset Store EULA. Contact me if you need a special license or have questions about licencing. Email - [e-mail]

Unity EULA - Explanation about seats and licenses

• One Single Entity Unity Asset Store License is for a 1 user. If multiple people work within Unity, you need multiple licenses.

• Everyone working on the project need their own license, including contractors. Example: 5 people working in Unity and 1 audio contractor = 6 licenses.

• These licenses can be used forever on any amount of projects/platforms. Example: 1 audio contractor works on game A then B, only needs 1 license.

Unity EULA - Section 2.3.2 and 2.3.4:

“END-USER is granted a single seat license to install and use” “a person must have its own license to the Asset” “For example, a person who is a Contractor must have a seat license [...], and the person who is hirer of the Contractor must have a seat license” From 2025-01-10

Compatibility with Adressables

Sonity supports using adressables to add and delete SoundEvents in realtime since version 1.0.5.

Compatibility with VR, Spatializer Plugins, Unity Native Audio

Sonity is built around the native audio system (AudioSources) in Unity, so everything that Unity audio supports Sonity also supports. You can of course replace the spatializers (HRTF libraries) with e.g. steam audio, resonance, oculus spatializer etc. These are some examples of compatible spatializers (read more here)

• Steam Audio Spatializer

• Oculus Spatializer Unity

• Google Resonance Audio Spatializer

• Vive 3DSP Audio SDK Spatializer

• Microsoft Spatializer

• Apple PHASE Spatializer

• Qualcomm 3D Spatializer

You need to enable HRTF Spatializer on the SoundContainer for this to work.

Compatibility with In-Game Voice Chats

Sonity is built around the native audio system (AudioSources) in Unity. So everything that Unity audio supports Sonity also supports. Sonity users have reported that Sonity works with:

• Vivox Voice Chat

• Dissonance Voice Chat

Unity AudioSources and Sonity

You can run Unity AudioSources separately at the same time as Sonity. Basically Sonity uses Unity AudioSources in the background.

Tip: You might want to increase the polyphony limit to allow for both Sonity and any other audio system to play at the same time.

Disabling Domain Reloading

Disabling domain reloading in the “enter play mode options” is supported since Sonity 1.0.3.

Testimonies From Users

User on Sonity vs Fmod: “I'm telling you, we had like 1 and a half days left of this gamejam and we couldn't get FMOD to work with GitHub, so my whole team got Sonity, knowing nothing about how it works or anything. And like after 1 hour I understood all the essential parts of Sonity and like no other Middleware has been able to do that for me atleast.” - Fyoum

User on ease of use: “Yeah its honestly as simple as install Sonity, slap some audio files in Unity, right click and use the Sonity tools to generate the needed files. From there you can tweak and edit the audio and easily preview in editor. Engineering side is as simple as referencing the SoundEven file you generated above and calling Play(transform) on it. I'm not an audio person (Technical Artist) and I found it very easy to pickup. From my tech art background and tool experience, I'm impressed with the time the Sonity devs put in to streamline the import and setup process. I really appreciate that they put in the extra work to make the editor side easy and quick to use.” - Dangledorf

Pros vs Master Audio

Thoughts on Sonity vs Master Audio by Pablo: Sonity has a more intuitive and easy to use UI based on scriptable object assets instead of having everything as prefabs as Master Audio does. This makes it a lot easier to work with because you can multi-edit everything and all changes are automatically saved instead of you having to apply the prefab.

Other Sonity exclusive features:

• Quickly add/update variations. No need for adding child objects for every variation as you do in Master Audio.

• Change fade in/out length easily with SoundModifiers.

• A SoundTrigger component which lets you play sounds easily without having to code.

• SoundPolyGroups which can help you to limit the polyphony in demanding applications, e.g. all bullet impacts can share one group of polyphony and use less voices.

• Automatic asset creation enables you to quickly create and set up thousands of assets in minutes.

• DSP (distortion/filters) per voice enables for a more natural sound where sounds can e.g. be filtered based on distance.

Thoughts on Sonity vs Master Audio by Baloneysandwich:

As a user of Master Audio for many years, it filled a gap in Unity's audio system well. I appreciate the work they have put in. However, 30 minutes into the new Trial that u/vengstrom put together, I can say that Sonity is worth a look and likely is superior. The scriptable object workflow alone sets it apart. You don't ever have to make another string literal reference in code. :) Mostly though you can tell that the author has done a lot of games and wanted to solve the issue where FMOD/WWise don't let you be quite close enough to the game in the Unity editor. For creators who like to iterate tightly on audio and code and gamefeel, the external tooling of the big packages can be a drag. I'm looking forward to spending more time with Sonity and anticipate I'll be switching a couple of my in-progress games to it.

Pros vs Unity’s Built in Audio System

Unity’s built in audio system is very bare-bones. You have to take care of everything, like e.g. making sound objects, then a good editor for them, pooling, whereas Sonity has a lot of built in functionality which will save you a lot of time!

Features of Sonity which Unity doesn't:

• Random audioclips

• Random pitch/volume

• Easily layer sounds

• Automatic sound pooling

• Easily live and multi-edit the sounds while the game is playing

• Custom low/highpass filters and distortion per sound

• Object based assets (SoundEvents) instead of having to create your own data structure

• Support for adressables with the adressable AudioMixer

• Control your sounds with SoundParameters in realtime

• Automatically create your assets for you

• Visually debug sounds ingame

• Built in music functionality like playlists, stems and intros

• Compontens for playing sounds without coding, eg: SoundTrigger & SoundPhysics

• Support for increasing the volume of your sounds above +0dB

Pros vs Fmod

This is based on my experience of using Fmod over many years.

Integration: Sonity is more tightly integrated into Unity with an in engine editor and helper objects. Non-sound parts of the team (like design) can easily set up new sounds themselves without needing to learn Fmod.

Platform support: Because Sonity is written in C# it works natively across all platforms which Unity supports.

Source code: The source code is included in the software so if there is any problem with a new Unity release and I haven’t had time to fix it you can quickly solve the problem yourself.

Version control: You don’t need to have multiple separate repos as you do for Fmod, everything is self contained in Unity.

Banks: You never have to build banks from your Fmod project into Unity and sync them. All Sonity sound assets are right there in your project, no banks required.

Price: Pay only once per seat instead of per release/platform as you have to do with Fmod.

Unique features: Features unique to Sonity which don’t exist in Fmod:

• Automatic asset creation.

• Being able to multi-edit everything.

• Debugging sounds live graphically can be very helpful and recording parameters.

More clean and easier to use code

In Sonity you'd write this to play a sound with it automatically taking care of instancing/pooling/releasing/positioning

footstep.Play(transform);

Whereas playing a sound in Fmod is quite convoluted and easier to mess up. This is equivalent Fmod code:

footstep = FMODUnity.RuntimeManager.CreateInstance("event:/Footstep");
footstep.set3DAttributes(FMODUnity.RuntimeUtils.To3DAttributes(gameObject));
footstep.start();
footstep.release();

Polyphony In Sonity, polyphony can be limited per owner. Fmod has no such options. This is a problem for optimization and voice stealing in demanding high performance situations.

Randomization Sonity has a better pseudo random feature, where it globally remembers more of the previously played AudioClips for less repetitive sounding playback.

Voice Stealing in Sonity

In Sonity if polyphony is full and you want to play a new sound, it will play the new sound and stop the sound with the lowest volume. Which is perfect because it always makes a new sound play instead of skipping it.

Voice Stealing in Fmod

Fmod doesn’t have a voice stealing mode which plays new sounds and steals the lowest volume one. For example in Fmod using stealing mode “Quietest”, if you play sounds which trigger progressively in a line from the AudioListener outwards, then Fmod will only play the closest (loudest) ones and not steal the quietest one to play the new one. Then you’ll have to use stealing mode “Oldest” in Fmod, but that is not very good because it only steals the oldest one disregarding volume/distance. Which can be a problem if you have quiet sounds happening far away and they steal all the older but louder instances closer to the AudioListener. So in Fmod there is no good solution which solves all voice stealing problems.

Pros vs Fabric 2

This is based on my experience of watching videos of fabric. The user interface of fabric is very barebones and looks very un-intuitive vs Sonity. Fabric uses gameobjects in the hierarchy instead of scriptable objects like the SoundEvent, which is worse for e.g. multi-editing/live editing/saving etc.

Pros vs MMSoundManager in Feel by More Mountains

This is based on my experience of reading the documentation. The interface of the is very barebones and looks very un-intuitive vs Sonity. It only supports one layer/audiosource at a time so it's going to be difficult to work with multi layered sounds, both for preview and implementation. Volume is in ratio eg. 0-1 and not decibel, which makes it really hard to dial in the correct volume. Pitch is the same, it's not based on semitones and is also really difficult to work with. Both volume and pitch are also min/max values and not base values with an added random offset . So if you’d want to eg. lower the volume you’d have to change both values and then recalculate and type in the random range yourself. There are no distance envelopes for spatial spread, and no control at all over spatial blend, which I really think makes audio sounds better.

Console eg. Xbox and Playstation support

Sonity is built upon Unity native audio eg. AudioSources and AudioMixerGroups. So everything that Unity supports, Sonity also supports. The only limitation with audio for consoles is that you can only have 1 audio backend. You can't use both Unity audio and Fmod/Wwise etc in the same project. Though you can use both Sonity and separate AudioSources because they're the same backend.

Surround 5.1, 7.1 support

Sonity uses Unity’s sound system (AudioSources), so it has the same multi-channel output capabilities as Unity's internal system.

All spatialized sounds will get output to their respective channels automatically if you have set up the “AudioSettings SpeakerMode” correctly. E.g. a spatialized sound playing behind the audio listener to the left will output to the rear left speaker in a 5.1 surround setup.

For non-spatialized sounds (like ambiences), if you input multi-channel files it will output multi-channel into their respective channels for the audio output automatically. E.g. a 6 channel ambience sound in a 5.1 setup will output to; front left, front right, center, rear left, rear right, LFE (subwoofer) respectively.

Bak

The Story of Sonity

Hello! It's me, Victor, the solo-developer behind Sonity :)

Basically it started out 2016 when I wanted to create a better audio system than the built in one in Unity. During the 6 years of development it was mostly side-work which I did during weekends and evenings after doing my normal audio freelance work at Sonigon where I do music, sound design and implementation for a wide variety of games.

Later during the developement I started using Sonity for games which we worked on, the first one being Rounds by Landfall which we did the sound design for and where I implemented all the sounds. Over time I've added more features, requested by both users, friends and a lot of things I've wanted to add myself.

Sonity has always been a passion project of mine and I've found it very educational to think about and implement all types of audio systems from the ground up, trying to find the best way to solve problems, always focusing on having really good GUI design and good documentation (which I also find very lacking in a lot of software haha).

I also want to thank all my friends who have supported me during my development and who also have expanded Sonity with integrations which I otherwise wouldn't had time to implement myself <3

Press Kit and Background Info

Developer: Victor Engström. Located in Sweden Release Date: 2022 October 11 Start of Development: 2016 December 2 (~6 years) Website: http://www.sonity.org/ Social: https://sonigon.com/sonity-discord/ High Resolution Logos: Dropbox Link