Don't understand the Streaming Assets folder

Unity
1

Happy new year!

I noticed that one of our new banks was not showing up in the Streaming Assets folder, yet the audio was still playing. I then deleted the entire folder, and nothing changed - everything continued to work perfectly fine.

The FMOD settings (Bank Import → Import Type) are set to Streaming Asset. I tried many things to force Unity to reimport the banks: Reimport All, deleting the entire Library folder, Refresh Banks, rebuilding the banks, restarting Unity, etc. The Streaming Assets folder remains empty, but the audio works as expected.

When I changed the Import Type to Asset Bundle, new files were created as expected.

What is happening here? Where is the audio coming from? From the Build folder in the FMOD project? Why won’t it reimport the banks?

In seven years of using FMOD, I can’t recall ever manually placing anything in the Streaming Assets folder. Is this a bug?

2

I believe the banks are copied into the Streaming Assets folder when you make a build of the Unity project, and the banks in that folder are not used while working in the editor, only in builds. I think you can pretty much ignore it.

3

What @zanhulme said is correct; in editor, banks are loaded directly from the Studio project or build path provided in the Bank Import section of FMOD for Unity’s settings. You can observe this in ./Assets/Plugins/FMOD/src/PlatformPlayInEditor.cs by adding a breakpoint or Debug.Log() on the return value of GetBankFolder(), which should return the bank location on disk. During the Unity build process, FMOD for Unity will copy these banks from where they are on disk to the StreamingAssets folder, which is then built into the main game package.