Remove new Audio Compressor
Yamiu
The Audio in VRChat is sice the Last Updae and the <modSnip: inappropriate language> Remove complet Broke. Audio is like shit and 18bit sometimes, Menu Audio is broken as f... and Animation. Please Add an option in the Menu to Activate/deactivate this feature or remove that Compressor. The Compressor Compress the Menu Sound, Animation Sound and YouTube Sound...
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rollthered
-16 DB for Spatial_Audio scripts have fixed this attack issue with the compressor. I feel like it should be better explained in the documentation though, or perhaps a warning in the SDK. That aside, it still will be abused on avatars whose sole purpose is to create painful transients. I feel like there should be some form of look ahead for the compressor to ensure this does not happen!!!
rollthered
I feel like the compressor is important to have, but the current settings need to be adjusted some more after having used it for long enough to notice some issues.
tammeeeǃ
rollthered: look ahead compressors are also delays at the same time. And that's also not what you'd want. Instead it's better to reduce attack
rollthered
tammeeeǃ: Wouldn't that cause more saturation overall though to sounds in general? At some point you would have to have a higher release time which may cause some other issues. A look ahead delay shouldn't be more than a few milliseconds so I don't understand how that could be an issue unless there would be something to do with the networking. As far as I would guess though, all compressors are calculated locally anyways.
bit 01
The compression is also breaking entirely for some people, causing their audio to go to earsplitting volume intermittently. It's not an avatar or a single sound source, all audio goes max volume.
FruityFusion
18 bit audio btw xD damn wtf
tammeeeǃ
18 Bit audio? That gives you a noise floor that is significantly lower than the noise your headset or onboard soundchip produces xD.
Seriously tho if it's that bad with quiet audio as GotoFinal said then I'd say up the threshold a bit. What settings are you using? I think I'd be better to use a combination of a main compressor with a bit slower response a low threshold with a smaller ratio like 2:1 and then add a second stage to duck louder volume. Such a setup is used in some music mixing scenarios too:
The second compressor could have these values. Let's say that an audio source peaks at -10dB. Set the threshold to like dunno -18dB, have a fast attack and release like maybe 5ms and 25ms, set the ratio quite high to something like 8:1. This can be finished off with a hard or soft limiter.
The goal with this setup is to let quiet parts be quiet but still more audible at lower headphone volumes than without anything. But also to fend extremely loud and sudden earrape.
I hope you guys figure out something that works well for most people and please yes please add an option to disable the effects. In hindsight I think it would have been better to make it opt-in first.
Rob Ouellette (KidKwazine)
tammeeeǃ: People seem to be mixing up data compression and dynamic range compression 😦
They are using multiple compressors in their signal chain though! I stress-tested their compressor [with sine waves + pink noise at varying peaks] during the beta when this was being toyed with to give feedback. It was originally just a master bus compressor iirc, but there were some issues with that; so now there's an avatar bus compressor, a voice channel compressor, subtractive gain staging (at least by default) + it all seems to feed to a (much tamed) master bus compressor/limiter. Music to the ears of any audio engineer!
If you try testing to come up with a decent solution, you quickly realize that it's trivial when you run into the zero sum question of: how do you set a compressor up when it's impossible to know anything about the properties of the input?
It should probably be opt-out. But at least as it stands now, the compression is mild - they just unfortunately can't account for people driving their audio mixer up or any "bad" inputs (clipping, etc.) within reasonable effort
tammeeeǃ
Rob Ouellette (KidKwazine): thank you for your reply. I haven't looked into it so thank you for your details ^~^.
Yup just make it togglable please .
GotoFinal
Yea, I have a very quiet audio source, that should be only possible to be heard when you are next to me and there are no other sounds around, now somehow for other people it is as loud as many other sounds from other avatars.
I even edited this audio file and manually made it quieter as unity didn't even allow me to go as quiet as I wanted it to be, but now it is loud again, and without me realizing it - my audio started to be annoying to a lot of people that should never hear it in the first place.