I am working on a Tinnitus like effect for when the player is hit. When playing back a high pitched square shaped (or other basic waveform) audio file in FMOD it introduces an audio artifact. The artifact is exhibited randomly - sometimes the audio plays fine all the way through, but many times it appears before the file completes playback.
Note - this is a VR game, and knowing that HRTF spatial processors can introduce such issues with basic waveforms, I tried to disabled the Steam Audio spatial processor to no avail, the issue is there even when played back in 2D with no spatializes in the chain.
Has anyone encountered such an issue or have an idea of how to work around it?
I remember an old thread similar to this but could t find it. The problem was with simple waveforms (sine, square, triangle, etc) getting high-frequency distortion artifacts caused by data compression when building banks, which is why you’d hear it only in-engine. I don’t think there was a solution, but different waveforms at different frequencies might play nicer with the compression algorithm.
Just a thought — you could try rendering your tinnitus waveform at an octave lower, then in FMOD raising the pitch an octave. The hope being that it might render it better without artifacts, or that any artifacts would be masked by pitching them up into inaudible frequencies.
Had a feeling compression was related, though I did hear it ingame when testing the event in Unity as well as in FMOD studio. I already tried differet octaves to check if it was related, but I am pretty sure I also heard artifacts with them.
I will try to change the source audio file to something more complex with the same desired effect.