Unity 5 audio import settings for iOS?

Thanks for the info. That forum post provides a bit more insight, but I'm still having trouble with a serious issue since upgrading. Perhaps you can help me with the issue I am trying to resolve.

In Unity 4.6.4 and using MasterAudio v3.5 we had a setup of mp3 files playing music with a playlist and WAV files being used for sound effects. This worked great. Each scene has a group with all the sounds needed for that scene and they would be loaded as needed. In our "battle" scene we setup 2 buses each with 5 and 15 max voices. Battles in our game involve a lot of sword, arrow and clanging type sounds that use the 15 voice bus, and the more important sounds were played on the 5 voice bus. By default if those buses reached their max then any new sounds would just be ignored and this suited our needs perfectly.

However, after updating to Unity 5 and MasterAudio v. 3.5.7.7 we are noticing a serious problem when played on an iOS device. In the battle scene things start off fine but after a short time the sounds start falling behind the action. It's like they get queued up or something and can't keep up with what is going on. Eventually when the battle ends, the sounds are still playing from things that happened 2 minutes ago. Normally at the end of a battle we click a button to load the next scene. However this scene load gets blocked and doesn't do anything until all the remaining sounds finish playing, at which point Unity then decides it can load the next scene.

I am not sure if the way buses handle overflow has changed, or if this is a problem with how my WAV import settings are configured or something else. Do you have any ideas what might be going on here? I have tried changing the import settings to all sorts of variations with no luck in fixing this issue. I've also tried setting the bus controls to "stop oldest" and that didn't fix the issue either.

Another piece of information that may be related is what I mentioned in my post above: the Unity editor log that shows all the "Used Assets, sorted by uncompressed size" when you do an iOS build used to show all the WAV files in our Resources folders listed here. However now they are not listed at all (which is baffling since they still work on device so they must exist somewhere). I'm not sure if this is related or not but it seems odd.

Any ideas?

So the problem is that all our Dynamic Sound Groups are configured in each scene with Audio Origin set to "Resource File" so that they aren't all in memory at once, instead they are meant to get loaded and unloaded in memory as needed. This worked great in Unity 4.6.4 and before.

However, now it seems these audio files take a long time to load into memory every time they play. The result is that all the sound gets backed up and out of sync with the game.

If I change these to Audio Origin "clip" they all play instantly and there is no synching problem. However, this means they are all in memory at all times and take up way too much memory on iOS device.

So, is there anything you can do to fix this? I am not sure what Unity or your plugin has changed that affects this, but something has clearly changed.

Please advise.

Out of curiosity, did your plugin change in this regard anytime after 3.5.0? We hadn't updated it in over a year until we upgraded to Unity 5 so we were still using v3.5.0 up until this change.

It does seem likely that the cause is related to Unity 5 audio changes, but I'm trying to narrow down all the possibilities as we figure out how to fix our problem. I will follow up in the Unity forums to see if I can shed any more light on the changes they made that might affect this.

Thanks,