Audio tips and tricks are a bit less common in Unreal but this one is a beauty and has saved me a bunch of time when setting up my looping ambient sounds in level.

Did you know that you can preview audio that’s in your scene from your editor viewport?

If you would prefer to watch the video version, check it out here

By default, this is not the case. When placing sounds into your scene you will not be able to hear them from your editor viewport. This can make customising sounds by changing volume, attenuation etc a bit of a pain.

Normally this would mean that you would have to guess at some settings and then play your level. Running around the area in order to gauge if the sounds attenuation range, volume etc feel about right. This creates a very back and forth problem where you adjust the sound, play then exit out and tweak the sounds again.

However, we can use our little audio tip to help out with this. From your viewport, go to your editor Settings and then go down to the Real Time Audio category. There you can click on the little speaker icon. This will unmute the viewport audio. This is hard to show in a blog but basically now you will be able to hear sounds from your viewport.

Now, from your editor view, as you get closer to your audio source and enter the sounds attenuation radius you will be able to hear it. I use this method to get a first-pass on my ambient sounds. It’s still very important to jump in and play your level to check the audio from your players perspective. However, being able to tweak and listen to the result from the editor viewport can really help to speed things up as it lets you get a sense of if a room/area audio-wise is being filled correctly without you having to play the level, reducing the amount of back and forth needed.

This is something I use all the time now when working with audio and I would definitely suggest giving it a try!

If you want more quick tips & tricks FOLLOW ME ON TWITTER @cbGameDev

Also, check out the parkour game I'm solo developing called Freerunners. Give it a wishlist if you like the way it looks!: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1430330/Freerunners/