Guides Audiobundles: assetbundles for sounds

But why put audio files into assetbundles???

• Lightning fast loading
• Easy to reuse

Tons of audio files can be loaded in a single assetbundle almost instantly; don't waste time waiting for the sounds in Scene Audio to finish loading.


Typical uses of audio in VaM scenes

• Speech for a story
• Moans and dirty talking in sexual activities
• Music and ambience
• Sound effects

You can add all these as wav, ogg, mp3, to Scene Audio, but if you have more than a few you have by now noticed take it makes your scene take longer to load. That's a bummer.
If you want to use them on another scene of yours, you have to add them one by one to Scene Audio, set the appropriate triggers to each, another pain in the endless pains of scene making in VaM.
Do you want to change the sounds for a different group of similar sounds? Tough shit, you probably need to redo the above and create a copy of your scene.

Naturally, a few tiny sounds you only need to use in one scene are not worthwhile making to an audiobundle, but if scaling, reuse or in-scene loading is of interest, and audiobundle is what you want to use.


Ok, audio assetbundles load fast and scale well, that's nice, but how to make them?

First you need some audio files, then for the Unity part, MacGruber made things easy for you already. Follow MacGruber's guide on how to make assetbundles to install the right Unity version and some extra tools that make the process easier:
Seriously, don't worry about all the weird stuff, just follow the guide and you'll be fine. I never touched anything Unity-wise or the likes before and managed to do audio assetbundles. You only need to do part of the guide, audio is essentially: drag and drop > build assetbundle > done.


Audiobundle workflow, step-by-step:



How to use an audiobundle?

There's a plugin that MacGruber created that will load and play audio assetbundles. This is in the Logicbricks VAR and the plugin is called SoundfromAB or RandomSoundfromAB. You can add it on a person, to use the HeadAudio receiver, or in some sound-related atom. Trigger the plugin and it plays.
I believe that by now other plugins exist that can play audiobundles, so make sure to check the Hub's plugins list for more options. There's also audiobundles being shared as resources.


Shameful self-promotion area
In my scenes I make extensive use of audiobundles for intro animations, sex speech, ambience, music, and sfx, especially on my NEXT template-based scenes. Those also include a scene structure process that I named quickspeech, that allows for in-scene reuse of audiobundles for sex speech. I share 2 voices as audiobundles that you can use on any of the template-based scenes.

The voices you can use:

The structure in detail, if you'd like to learn more: