ResonanceAudio plugin + VCAs and busses - any progress on the issue?

Hi there everyone. I just found a horrible truth about ResonanceAudio plugin. It completely prevents me to use VCA´s and busses in my project. I found some forum threads that are several years old that had discussed the same problem. It seems however, that untill this day, the problem stays the same. If you use ResonanceAudio plugin and listener on a certain events, they completely bypass FMOD´s VCA´s and even busses and I am not able to use any of these. Is there any easy workaround for this? I am therefore not able to do any group-mixing, because whatever buss/group of sounds I create, the sliders/faders simply don´t react to the volume. This is a complete bummer for me since nearly half of our project is based on resonance audio´s spatialiser. This is a huge letdown and it should be shown immediatelly to any user of FMOD clicking on and using Resonance Audio plugin for the first time.

The Resonanace Audio effects are not developed and maintained by Firelight Technologies, but by Resonance Audio. If you want these effects to be changed, I recommend contacting Resonance Audio and letting them know your concerns.

I should mention, however, that bypassing normal bus routing is a byproduct of how Resonance Audio spatializes signals, and is likely impossible to change without entirely re-designing Resonance Audio’s spatialization from scratch.

I can definitely see how that would be useful. Again, I recommend contacting Resonance Audio and asking them to add that warning to their plug-in for FMOD Studio.

Do you know of any alternatives for FMOD that do not have those limitations? We are also using Resonance but would change to another Spatializer plugin in a heartbeat.

Atmoky

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Do FMOD Studio’s built-in “spatializer” or “object spatializer” effects suit your project’s requirements?

Thanks for the hint. That looks really promising!

Hey Joseph,
we need a spatializer, an ambisonics player and room simulation where you can define the material of walls etc. Reason did all that quite well but now we are at the state where we need to use VCAs and busses. Quite frankly we also thought that this will be resolved in the future but unfortunately it never did.

Atmokey looks interesting but I am not quite sure if it also allows to siimulate rooms etc.

Unfortunately, I’m not aware of any effect that can both handle ambisonics and does not bypass the mixer.

I just received this message from the atmokey folks:

  • Using VCA and bus functionality is not a problem with trueSpatial, as contrary to Resonance, our spatializer does not work like an insert that routes audio data out of FMOD and back in at a later stage.
  • Rendering 1st order ambisonics to binaural is also covered with our AmbisonicRenderer plugin.
  • Room simulation unfortunately is not part of atmoky trueSpatial at this time. We do have this on our roadmap, but currently there is no ETA as to when it will happen.

What do you think?

I think it sounds like atmoky trueSpatial fulfills some, but not all, of your stated requirements. As I do not know which of your stated requirements are essential to your game and which are merely ideal-but-not-strictly-necessary, I cannot say whether or not you should use it as a solution.

I can say that, as a general rule, it’s never safe to assume promised future features of software products will eventuate in time to be used by a game that’s currently in development. A major advantage of modern agile software development methods is that they allow a product’s roadmap and development schedule to be adjusted on short notice; as an unavoidable consequence of this, planned features may occasionally be delayed or descoped. Thus, there is no guarantee that a promised feature will be released while your game is still in development, and even if it does arrive before your game’s release date, there’s no guarantee that you’ll have enough development time left to take full advantage of it.

I therefore recommend that you take a careful look at your requirements, and decide which, if any, you are willing to compromise on. Then, look at atmoky trueSpatial’s current feature set without taking into account any of its planned future features, and decide whether or not your game should use it on that basis.