Max amount of simultaneous, hearable sounds?

Question

So I am doing something of an experiment in which I need as many sounds as possible to be playing, and hearable, simultaneously. The problem is that I don't know, and don't know how to find out, how many simultaneous sounds are possible. I can seemingly set the amount of playing audio sources very high (500+) without Unity complaining, but I'm very confident in that not all of them are hearable, especially since the audio settings Real Voice Count has a roof of 255.

In the documentation it says that if too many sounds are playing some of them will be bypassed, which means that using audio.isPlaying() still will return true, even if the audio in fact can't be heard.

So how many sounds can Unity output at the same time? Or how can I find it out if its platform specific? Is Unity or my computer the bottleneck?

Thank you for your time!

Answer 1

I never did figure this out, but I did however figure out how to bypass it. I have since move on from Unity to Python for the experiment, but I see no reason why the principle behind shouldn't work.

The idea is to have all sounds available in "raw" data; as in two arrays (one for the left channel and one for the right, if you're looking stereo sound that is) containing all of the sounds samples. Then just add these arrays to two "main" arrays, which will be your master sound output (excuse my probable misuse of proper terminology) at the correct time. It'll be a bit tricky to keep track of the indices, keeping sample rates and timings in mind. The main arrays should then be continually streaming it's contents to the audio output, making it possible to add the desired sounds to it at the correct times.

It might take a while to implement at first, and the efficiency is probably dependent on the kind of sounds you want to add. I have it easy, seeing that my separate audios are pure note sine waves, but then again I can play more than a thousand of them in less than a second. You'd also probably want to be careful of the amplitudes when adding many sounds together at the same time (experiment at low volumes!).

Anyhow, I hope this might help someone :)

Max amount of simultaneous, hearable sounds?

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