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How to adjust the compression of audio loaded through WWW?
I am looking to have control over what sort of compression an audio file is loaded at (from WWW), and whether it is imported as 3D sound, mono, etc. Basically, the stuff that can be done through AudioImporter or the Audio Import Settings.
The only difference is that this would need to be applied to audio files that are not known at compile time, and which are loaded via WWW. If I could even define the settings globally in Unity in advance (so that all files loaded through WWW are coming in with certain settings), that would also be workable. Right now it is noticeably degrading the quality of my stereo 192 kbps bitrate ogg files, though, which is making everything sound fairly muddy and muffled.
My sound designer and I are going to experiment with having a lower bitrate of 128 kbps and with a higher encoding quality, so maybe that will work, but it still seems like I ought to be able to make this work without having to modify files that play back perfectly well in other apps.
Answer by Eric5h5 · Mar 24, 2010 at 01:56 AM
The compression of audio that's loaded from WWW depends on how it's saved. There is no functionality for re-compressing audio that's loaded at runtime. As the docs mention, www.audioClip returns immediately, so you can stream audio even if the entire clip hasn't downloaded.
Well, that is certainly what I would hope was the case, but I am still mystified as by why the quality of playback is so much degraded in that case. Some sort of transcoding is taking place, unless the ogg playback capabilities are just naturally muddy, which I highly doubt. I'll see what happens when we re-encode the files to a lower bitrate but higher quality, and report back. For now, though, you've at least answered my major question.
@x4000: I can't recall any audio quality problems with WWW Ogg files, although it's been a while since I've done that, back when Unity used OpenAL rather than F$$anonymous$$OD.