Unity Development Cookbook, 2nd Edition

Chapter 11. Sound and Music

Audio can be one of the most important parts of an interactive experience, especially when you’re building a game. Unity has a wide range of tools for both simple and complex audio setups. In this chapter, we’ll discuss both the basics of how to get audio working in your scenes and more advanced ways to control how your project sounds.

Warning

Sound and music are far, far more important than you might suspect. If you’re building a game, don’t leave out sound, music, and audio.

As with other chapters, this chapter is far from an exhaustive collection of recipes covering everything you might ever need to do with audio in Unity. Instead, we try to cover the things that, as Unity developers, we find ourselves implementing over and over again, game after game, project after project.

11.1 Playing Sounds

Problem

You want to play sound and music in your project.

Solution

To play an audio clip, you first need an audio file to play. If you already have one in mind, drag and drop it into your project.

Tip

If you need sound effects for your game, there are places where you can find some for free. Kenney has a decent collection of public-domain sound effects; community sites like Freesound have a wider range of both material and quality. You can also create your own. Bfxr is a free app for Windows and Mac that generates retro-style sound effects. Humble Bundle also often runs great deals for large collections of game resources.

Once you’ve added the audio ...