The latter part of this decade has seen FMOD and Miles’ dominance of the audio middleware market seriously challenged by Montreal-based Audiokinetic’s Wwise. Ed Fear spoke to Simon Ashby, the firm’s VP of product strategy, to see how this year’s new products have gone down and what’s next for 2010…

Develop: How has the past year been for Audiokinetic?
Simon Ashby: It’s been a good year. We’re growing our market share and expect this to accelerate in the year to come. I think the fact that we are seeing more Wwise titles shipping is helping undecided customers to make the jump to Wwise.

You’ve recently signed a long-term deal to work together with High Voltage – how is that partnership going to work and shape the future of your products?
Long term agreements such as this one are a confirmation that what we offer today is in line with what developers expect. This kind of partnership is key and will allow us to work closely with our users to shape the future of interactive audio. […]

Read the rest of the interview on Develop Magazine…

A partnership between Audiokinetic and McDSP has brought two new real-time plugins to the WWISE game audio pipeline. The ML1 is a brick-wall limiter,  and the FutzBox is a distortion and speaker simulation.  These tools are providing sound designers with more choices during the production of their game. Many times to get the sound that you want the effect has to be “baked in” to the file to maintain a certain quality. With the development of more real-time plugin effect options it gives an opportunity for the asset creator to that mimic how they work in a DAW and leave decision like these to later in the process.

“McDSP plug-ins are a staple for many game developers as essential audio production tools. With the release of Wwise 2009.3, McDSP effects will be available in the Wwise audio engine for sound rendering, and as real-time effects on a variety of gaming consoles. We’re pleased to be a part of Audiokinetic’s growing platform”, says McDSP founder and CTO Colin McDowell

Any news about Halo Wars is good news right? In that spirit, Ensemble Studios announced today that its chosen [Montreal based] Audiokinetic’s Wwise — WaveWorks Interactive Sound Engine — as its audio pipeline solution. The software helps developers blend sound effects, render effects, generate sound banks for use within a game, as well as several other editing tools for sound designers and programmers.

"Wwise is playing a major role in helping Ensemble Studios create the engaging audio experience that we feel Halo Wars deserves," says Kevin McMullan, Music/Sound Lead, Ensemble Studios. "The first thing that stood out for us about Wwise was just how well it was designed. Because the support team was so open, responsive and helpful, the integration of Wwise into our development environment was incredibly smooth and easy."

Video game audio solution provider Audiokinetic has released Wwise 2009.3, the latest version of its award-winning audio pipeline solution, including a number of notable new enhancements.

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The Montreal-based company, whose tool is used by companies such as High Voltage and Frontier Developments, also gave a sneak-peek of its roadmap for Wwise for 2010, and revealed that new features will include a convolution reverb.

“We’re pursuing our goal to see Wwise become a comprehensive platform for sound design, while answering our customers’ needs,” said Simon Ashby, VP Product Strategy, Audiokinetic. “Our users asked for more high-quality effects and a convolution reverb, so we’re delivering these, and more.”

Canadian [Montreal] middleware provider Audiokinetic may have launched its new SoundSeed product as a family of plug-ins for its established WaveWorks Interactive Sound Engine (Wwise), but it seems that the potential is much wider.

“At the moment, we’re releasing SoundSeed through Wwise because we’re looking to extend Wwise as a platform – but don’t be surprised if you see SoundSeed appearing in others areas as well, maybe some game-related, maybe some not,” says Jacques Deveau, Audiokinetic’s program manager. “We have other options. The technology is easily adaptable for any host.”

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Audiokinetic Inc. and Epic Games, Inc. today announced that Wwise, the industry’s leading audio pipeline solution, is now integrated with Epic’s Unreal Engine 3 (UE3), the number one game engine for cross-platform game development. As a member of Epic’s exclusive Integrated Partners Program (IPP), Audiokinetic provides a complete integration that will allow developers and publishers licensing UE3 to easily integrate Wwise into their development pipeline.

Wwise is a complete audio pipeline solution that features the tight integration of an advanced audio authoring tool and a robust sound engine. Designed for next-generation platforms, Wwise aims to revolutionize the traditional game audio development process and allows users to audit, profile, and modify sounds in real-time within the game itself. Wwise is presently being used in the development of 85 titles, a significant percent of which are powered by UE3.

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