Hi there, comparing wwise and fmod for our current project, fmod looks great for projects that use addressables.
I did have a concern regarding content updates though.
In our game we push out lots of little updates using addressables. The users don’t have to re-download everything - the addressables system ensures they only download “dirty”/“changed” assets.
Fmod seems to write over the placeholder contents of the text bank assets and fill them with the real content at build time.
Does this mean that our players would have to re-downloading all fmod-related bundles every time we update our game? I suspect the addressables/asset bundle system will see the files as “dirty” and require them to be re-downloaded by the players?
I have not tested this yet, I’m still researching and comparing both. Figured I would post here and see if I could get a quick answer before I try for myself.
Thanks so much
Apologies for the delayed response- I haven’t tested with the full distribution pipeline of Addressables myself so I cannot offer much insight here unfortunately. I think you are right, if you have a pipeline setup that will automatically push “changed” assets then all of the built Asset Bundles will be pushed out.
If you do go with FMOD, please let us know if you run into any issues using Addressables and we will investigate.
Hey Jeff, thanks for the response.
I think we will go with WWISE. They have similar issues regarding addressables but our audio engineer is familiar with it.
" I think you are right, if you have a pipeline setup that will automatically push “changed” assets then all of the built Asset Bundles will be pushed out."
Just want to make sure this is clear: This is not specific to our pipeline. This is just how addressables work! 
If you have a game that ships with just a binary and downloads all content from the server on launch (like most ‘big’/‘modern’ mobile games, for example), you will have this problem if using addressables + FMOD.
Every time you perform a content update build to change something, no matter how small, all of your sounds will need to be redownloaded because FMOD will ‘modify’ the files and unitys Asset Bundle system will assume they need to be redownloaded. This part is out of our control. And it would annoy users and cost us money every time!
WWISE has a similar problem - their recommended workflow involves occasionally ‘resyncing’ your sound banks (Which deletes the assets and reimports them again). This will cause our users to redownload all audio again for the next content pack update. It is not as bad as FMOD, because in theory this will only occur when you resync your sound banks.
I understand Addressables are still fairly new, so it’s fair enough that the workflows aren’t entirely ironed out yet! For what it’s worth, if FMOD had solved this problem then we would have definitely gone with FMOD for this project! Our Audio Engineer says FMOD/WWISE are fairly similar to he was happy to use either and this would’ve swayed our decision. The higher ups can make of that what they will, hehe
Thanks for your time, Jeff!
Thanks for the feedback, I will pass this on to the Dev team to look into in more detail. We certainly don’t want people having to download all of the game’s audio with every build and this seems to be something we should investigating.
I am currently trying to reproduce this issue but I am not having any luck so far.
It sounds like the problem arises at the time of building the Addressable bundles, the bundle containing the FMOD Banks is modified when updating a previous build. In theory I can understand this, but I cannot reproduce this myself.
Are you able to provide any more information at all? Even a project that reproduces the issue if possible.
I tested using:
- Unity 2021.3.4f1
- Addressables 1.19.19
- FMOD 2.01.11 & 2.02.07
Hey Cameron!
So sorry to send you on a wild goose chase - I never actually encountered the problem, we didn’t get that far into integration. We’ve had lots of issues regarding addressables and asset deletion/creation/modification resulting in huge update downloads - it’s a very brittle system in our experience. I was trying to weigh up which audio middleware to use and the way the addressable build process was described in your documentation stood out as a red flag. I just moved straight on to Wwise instead.
Sorry if I made you waste your time! I should have made it clearer that I was just speculating!
1 Like
No problem.
From my testing it appears that the Addressables system is looking at the end result of building the bundles and knows if the FMOD Banks have actually been modified or not.
I’ll also be updating the docs on this topic, for anyone wondering in the future.