Preventing audio ducking behavior (resolved)

Unity
1

Hi, I’m currently doing advanced controller haptics and in the process it has become very clear that there is some sort of audio ducking behavior occurring that I don’t know how to stop, and it also affects the haptics.

I commented out the code that makes the haptics/sound play through the controller so it is easy to see it happen in this scenario as well, but it happens either way

//RuntimeManager.CoreSystem.loadPlugin(“Assets/Resources/fmod_output_controller.dll”, out uint handle);
//RuntimeManager.CoreSystem.setOutputByPlugin(handle);

Loud - fmod audio example - YouTube

The loud noises on collisions are basically the haptics data, but notice when the orange arm touches the ground, the waterfall volume slowly creeps up over time afterward.

It’s quite dramatic and more obvious when it’s just haptics affecting this since there is no other competing sound

Could anyone point me to what might cause this?

fmod studio 2.03.06
unity 2022.3.55f1

apparently this is Windows-wide behavior of some sort

Currently on an adventure uninstalling audio drivers, updating, etc. No luck so far

Eventually after updating my audio drivers from my motherboard’s downloads page
(Realtek Audio Driver v6.0.9700.1 for windows 11 64-bit.), it seems the ducking issue is no longer happening, finally

2

Happy to hear that you resolved the issue!

Yes, this was likely caused at the OS or driver level, where audio output will be ducked if output is too loud. Besides the OS/driver, you could likely address this by ensuring that the output of the FMOD system isn’t too loud - i.e. appropriate gain staging and attenuation, compression and limiting, or by using the FMOD_INIT_CLIP_OUTPUT Core API initialization flag on system initialization, which will cause the output of the system to be hard clipped at 0 dBFS.

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