Audio Workflow

Recording

Audacity/FL Studio

Unity

Naming

Audio follows the studio pattern like everything else, with its own category list:

Audio Clips

These are the only valid categories for audio clips. All fall into one of these.

Audio categories

SFX · MUS · AMB · VO · UI

Category Note Example
SFX Special effect Gunshots, footsteps
MUS Music
AMB Ambient sounds Wind, rain, chatter
VO Voice over NPC dialogue, player voice
UI User interface Clicks, hovers, scrolls

The action goes after the number, and a variation is a two-digit number after that. So a
randomised pool of shotgun fire reads AU_SFX_Wpn_Shotgun_01_Fire_01, …_Fire_02, and so on.

Format

Audio

An emitter, an ambience zone, or a music trigger, wrapped so a designer can place it.

  • Test. Is the only thing it does make sound?

Allowed formats

.wav for anything short and triggered. No decode cost, no quality loss on something you will hear
a thousand times. Music and ambience can be .ogg, where the file size matters more than the
handful of milliseconds it costs to stream.

allowedFormats

Key Value
SFX wav
MUS ogg, wav
AMB ogg, wav
VO wav
UI wav

Mono vs stereo

requireMono

Key Value
SFX true
VO true
UI false
MUS false
AMB false

Anything meant to have a position in the world has to be mono. Unity cannot pan a stereo clip
to a point in space, so a stereo footstep plays flatly in both ears no matter where the character
is. Music and ambience stay stereo, because they are not coming from anywhere.

Loudness

loudness (LUFS)

Key Value
SFX -18
MUS -16
AMB -22
VO -16
UI -18

Tolerance: 2

Measured as integrated loudness, with the tolerance either side. Mixing by ear across a session
drifts; mixing to a target does not.

Length

maxDurationSeconds

Key Value
SFX 10
UI 5

A one-shot longer than this is usually a loop that was not marked as one, or several sounds that
want to be separate clips.