Miles Sound System

Company: Rad Game Tools
www.radgametools.com

The Miles Sound System is one of the most popular pieces of middleware ever released. It has been licensed for over 6,000 games on 18 different platforms!

Miles features a no-compromise toolset that integrates high-level sound authoring with 2D and 3D digital audio, featuring streaming, environmental and convolution reverb, multistage DSP filtering, and multichannel mixing, and highly-optimized audio decoders (MP3, Ogg and Bink Audio).

Why Miles is right for your game

• Miles is Scalable: Miles has a design focused on delivering gigabytes of sound data and tens of thousands of events to your game without issue, with powerful tools to manage voice limits. Miles 10 can handle projects of any size. Designed for the game Titanfall 2, we worked to handle an absurdly complex soundscape, with tens of thousands of audio sources and events required by a game of this complexity and polish!
• Miles is Performant: Miles 10 blends a cache-friendly mixing architecture with processor efficient algorithms to get the most out of every platform. And when using the Bink Audio format (with RAD’s own extremely optimized FFT kernels), you can use compressed audio with a ridiculously tiny CPU bump. Take a look at the CPU numbers for more details!
• Miles is Powerful: Miles Studio is a comprehensive toolset providing complete control over compression levels, mixing, busing, localization, spatialization, routing, DSP, and game parameterization.
• Miles works with Teams: Miles Studio allows designers to work on their own assets without generating conflicts with anyone else, which lets large teams of designers work in parallel. Projects are made of tiny text files, allowing easy diffs and multiple audio engineers working simultaneously. Then, for runtime, you render these flexible projects into packed data files with platform specific options, limits, and formats.
• Miles is Iterative: Miles connects your game to Miles Studio, allowing for modifying, adding, or removing anything in your project instantly while the game is running – all without reopening the game or reloading a level.
• Miles is Introspective: Connecting your game to Miles Studio records TONS of information, from loading times to volume levels of every voice, to what event started what, to the value of every game parameter. This allows for rapid debugging of the sound scape, preventing subtle yet audible issues from consuming valuable production time.

• Miles is Rapid: Miles Studio has an intuitive UI with minimal work necessary to get straightforward tasks complete, and for large adjustments, a spreadsheet style editor for bulk edits. On the code side, a robust, straightfoward, and powerful API allows for minimal engineer time to integrate features.
• Miles is Small: Miles streams and decodes compressed audio on the fly, allowing for a minimal footprint. Data limits can be enforced, ensuring that high demand areas of the game do not prevent important sounds from playing.
• Miles is Cross Platform: The Miles runtime uses the same API for every platform. Miles Studio content can be tailored on a per platform basis as needed.

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Fabric

Company: Tazman-Audio
www.tazman-audio.co.uk

Overview

Fabric provides a plethora of audio features and custom user interfaces that allow developers to design great audio entirely within unity. It’s nested component hierarchy allows users to create complex audio structures and combined with its event based system Fabric reduces the dependency on programmers giving more power to the sound-designers to work independently.

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Audacity

Company: The Audacity Team
audacity.sourceforge.net

Audacity® is free, open source, cross-platform audio software for multi-track recording and editing.
Audacity is available for Windows®, Mac®, GNU/Linux® and other operating systems.

Recording

Audacity can record live audio through a microphone or mixer, or digitize recordings from other media. With some sound cards, and on any recent version of Windows, Audacity can also capture streaming audio.

• Device Toolbar manages multiple recording and playback devices.
• Level meters can monitor volume levels before, during and after recording. Clipping can be displayed in the waveform or in a label track.
• Record from microphone, line input, USB/Firewire devices and others.
• Record computer playback on Windows Vista and later by choosing “Windows WASAPI” host in Device Toolbar then a “loopback” input.
• Timer Record and Sound Activated Recording features.
• Dub over existing tracks to create multi-track recordings.
• Record at very low latencies on supported devices on Linux by using Audacity with JACK.
• Record at sample rates up to 192,000 Hz (subject to appropriate hardware and host selection). Up to 384,000 Hz is supported for appropriate high-resolution devices on Windows (using WASAPI), Mac OS X, and Linux.
• Record at 24-bit depth on Windows (using Windows WASAPI or Windows DirectSound host), Mac OS X or Linux (using ALSA or JACK host).
• Record multiple channels at once (subject to appropriate hardware).

Import and Export

Import sound files, edit them, and combine them with other files or new recordings. Export your recordings in many different file formats, including multiple files at once.

• Import and Export WAV, AIFF, AU, FLAC and Ogg Vorbis files.
• Fast “On-Demand” import of WAV or AIFF files (letting you start work with the files almost immediately) if read directly from source.
• Import and export all formats supported by libsndfile such as GSM 6.10, 32-bit and 64-bit float WAV, RF64, and U/A-Law.
• Import MPEG audio (including MP2 and MP3 files) using libmad.
• Import raw (headerless) audio files using the “Import Raw” command.
• Create WAV or AIFF files suitable for burning to audio CD.
• Export MP3 files with the optional LAME encoder library.
• Import and export AC3, M4A/M4R (AAC) and WMA with the optional FFmpeg library (this also supports import of audio from video files).

Sound Quality

• Supports 16-bit, 24-bit and 32-bit (floating point) samples (the latter preserves samples in excess of full scale).
• Sample rates and formats are converted using high-quality resampling and dithering.
• Tracks with different sample rates or formats are converted automatically in real time.

Editing

• Easy editing with Cut, Copy, Paste and Delete.
• Find the spot to edit easily with scrubbing and seeking or Timeline Quick-Play.
• Unlimited sequential Undo (and Redo) in the session to go back any number of steps.
• Edit and mix large numbers of tracks.
• Multiple clips are allowed per track.
• Label tracks with selectable Sync-Lock Tracks feature for keeping tracks and labels synchronized.
• Draw Tool to alter individual sample points.
• Envelope Tool to fade the volume up or down smoothly.
• Automatic Crash Recovery in the event of abnormal program termination.

Accessibility

• Tracks and selections can be fully manipulated using the keyboard.
• Large range of keyboard shortcuts.
• Excellent support for JAWS, NVDA and other screen readers on Windows, and for VoiceOver on Mac in legacy Audacity 2.1.1.

Effects

• • • Real-time preview of LADSPA, LV2, VST and Audio Unit (macOS) effects.
    • Plug-in Manager handles plug-in installation and addition/removal of effects and generators from the menus.
    • Generate tones, silence, noise, instruments or rhythm track.
    • Change the pitch without altering the tempo.
    • Change the tempo without altering the pitch.
    • Noise Reduction to remove static, hiss, hum or other constant background noises.
    • Alter frequencies with Equalization, Bass and Treble, High Pass, Low Pass and Notch Filter effects.
    • Filter a frequency selection created in Spectrogram view or Spectral Selection Toolbar using spectral edit effects.
    • Adjust volume with Compressor, Amplify, Normalize, Fade In/Out, Studio Fade Out, Crossfade Clips, Crossfade Tracksand Adjustable Fade effects.
    • Reduce or Isolate Vocals given suitable stereo tracks (vocal reduction produces a stereo result).
    • Create voice-overs for podcasts or DJ sets using Auto Duckeffect.
    • Other built-in effects include:
      • Distortion
      • Echo
      • Limiter
      • Paulstretch (extreme stretch)
      • Phaser
      • Reverb
      • Reverse
      • Truncate Silence
      • Wahwah
    • Run “Chains” of effects on a project or multiple files in Batch Processing mode.

Plug-ins

• • • Support for LADSPA, LV2, Nyquist, VST and Audio Uniteffect plug-ins.
    • Effects written in the Nyquist programming language can be easily modified in a text editor – or you can even write your own plug-in.
    • Experimental modules that extend the functionality of Audacity.

Analysis

• • • Spectrogram view mode for visualizing and selecting frequencies.
    • Plot Spectrum window for detailed frequency analysis.
    • Sample Data Export for exporting a file containing amplitude values for each sample in the selection and Sample Data Import for import of numeric values from a plain ASCII text file
    • Contrast Analysis for analyzing average RMS volume differences between foreground speech and background music.
    • Support for adding VAMP analysis plug-ins.

 

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Cubase

Company: Steinberg Media Technologies
www.steinberg.net

Overview

Cubase condenses almost three decades of Steinberg expertise into the most cutting-edge digital audio workstation anywhere. The users of our flagship DAW are among the most successful artists on the globe — from engineers recording and mixing rock albums to dance DJs, hip hop producers, songwriters creating pop hits or film composers scoring for Hollywood blockbusters. Cubase combines industry-leading sound quality, intuitive handling and a range of advanced audio and MIDI tools for composition, recording, editing and mixing.

General

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Cubase Pro 9	Cubase Artist 9	Cubase Elements 9
Ideal for: Professional producers, mixing engineers, composers	Ideal for: Seasoned musicians, project studio owners, bands	Ideal for: Home recordists, bands, singer/songwriters, creative musicians
32-bit/192 kHz Steinberg audio enginewith 5.1 surround support	32-bit/192 kHz Steinberg audio engine	32-bit/192 kHz Steinberg audio engine
256 physical inputs and outputs	32 physical inputs and outputs	24 physical inputs and outputs
Record and mix unlimited audio, instrument and MIDI tracks	Record and mix up to 64 audio and 128 MIDI tracks	Record and mix up to 48 audio and 64 MIDI tracks
Unlimited instrument tracks	32 instrument tracks	24 instrument tracks
64 VST instrument slots	32 VST instrument slots	16 VST instrument slots