Unity Game Development Cookbook

Chapter 11. Sound and Music

Audio can be one of the most important parts of a game’s experience, and Unity has a wide range of tools for both simple and complex 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 game sounds.

Warning

Sound and music is far, far more important than you might suspect. Don’t leave out sound, music, and audio in your game.

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

11.1 Playing Sounds

Problem

You want to play sound and music in your game.

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.nl 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.

Once you’ve added the audio asset to your project, configure how Unity imports it by selecting it and looking at the Inspector (Figure 11-1). Unity supports .aif, .wav, .mp3, and .ogg audio. ...