Sounds And Music

This section explains how to add a sound resource to your game.

To add a sound resource to your game, use the Resource menu or right-click on the resource tree and select Create Sound, or you can use the corresponding button on the toolbar. Any of those will bring up the following window: To load a sound, press the Load Sound button to the right of the sound name. A file selector dialogue pops up in which you can select the sound file, which can only be either a wave file or an MP3 file. In general, Wave files (*.wav) are used for the short sound effects as even though they are generally larger files they will play instantaneously due to the fact that they do not need any type of decoding for playing. You can also have multiple wave files playing at once, which is why you should use these for all the sound effects in your game.

MP3 (*.mp3) files should be used for background music as GameMaker: Studio only permits you to play one music track at a time. These files are much smaller than a wave file would be but have a small CPU overhead as they have to be decoded before being played, hence the limit of only one MP3 file being played at time (however, you can have multiple music tracks in your game, and you would just switch between them when necessary).
Once you have loaded your file you can preview the sound by using the play button which will loop it continuously. This is very handy as it means you can make changes to the volume using the slider at the bottom of the window and hear what the effect it will have on the sound. There is a stop button too, so you can stop the preview at any time.

NOTE: Previous versions of GameMaker accepted MIDI file format but that is not the case with GameMaker: Studio. You cannot use MIDI any longer and any imported files from legacy versions which use these may cause the program to crash. These files should be removed or changed before testing!

The sound window also has other options which are explained below.

Audio Groups

You can assign your audio file to a specific Audio group. These are created from the Global Game Settings Audio Groups Tab and are used to to group audio assets together for easier memory management and volume control. Once an audio file has been assigned to a group you can then use the specific audio group functions to change them and lo load/unload them from memory. See the section on Audio Functions for further information. Note that while the rest of the audio properties are configuration specific, the audio group setting is not and a sound will belong to the same group on all configurations that you use.

NOTE: Audio groups can only be used when working with the normal audio system, but will not work with legacy audio.

Compression

The above rules for file types are for the default configuration of Uncompressed audio. However, you can select to Compressed audio should you wish to use that. What this will do is force all your sound files (irrespective of whether they are *.wav or *.mp3) to be compressed down to Ogg Vorbis *.ogg format files for all platforms.

These sounds are smaller on disc, but will have a slight CPU overhead due to the need to be uncompressed before being played, so you should keep that in mind if you wish to use compression in an already CPU intensive game.

Streaming

If you have chosen compressed audio, you can then also choose to have your sound as streamed or not streamed. A streamed sound will be one that is uncompressed and played in real time, streamed from the disc. Streaming is ideal for music as it reduces the one off overhead of uncompressing the whole file, which may cause a pause in the game, but is not recommended for simple sound effects where the hit on the CPU is much less.

Quality And Volume

If you have loaded an *.ogg file or an *.mp3 file into the IDE, you will be presented with a "quality" slider. Changing this will change the encoding that is used and therefore reduce (or improve) the final quality of the sound. Note that the better the quality, the larger the file, and that increasing this on a low quality audio file will not improve the quality noticeably and only bloat the final game. In general the default value is fine for most games.

Beside the quality bar for all file types, you can set the maximum volume for a sound, ie: if the slider is at 0.5 then the max volume for that sound when the gain is 1, will be half the recorded volume for the sound. Note that if you are using the legacy audio system to play the sound (or are working on the HTML5 target), this slider is simply the initial volume of the sound and can be changed by setting the volume using the appropriate legacy function.

Target Options

The Target Options panel is where you set the conversion rates for your game. These settings will affect how the sound is exported for the target platform, and GameMaker: Studio will automatically convert your sound files for you - you simply control the final quality of those sounds when converted. Generally the default settings of 16 bit, 44100kHz and 192kbps are perfectly adequate, but it may be that you wish sound effects (for example) to have a lower quality and music to have a higher quality, in which case these settings can be changed.

You can also choose whether the conversion should be mono, stereo or 3D. If you plan on using the audio emitter functions to create 3D sound effects, you should indicate this here, otherwise choose mono or stereo depending on the use that the sounds are going to be put to.

NOTE: The higher the quality, the larger the file, and this should be taken into account when deciding what bitrate to choose.

External Editor

GameMaker: Studio does not have a built-in sound editor. But, in the Editor Preferences, you can indicate external editors that you want to use for editing sounds. If you selected these you can press the button labelled Edit Sound to open the chosen editor and change the current sound. The GameMaker: Studio window will be hidden while you edit the sound and returns when you close the sound editor (you must save the sound in the editor first otherwise it will not be saved in GameMaker: Studio).

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