Welcome to the new Engine Audio site redesign! As we attempt to expand our reach we come up with a couple of new way  to keep in touch.

All of our latest videos are available through our YouTube Channel.  We will keep this up to date with not only our video content the best links to the best videos from across the net.

Follow us on twitter @engineaudio. For all of the thoughts that don’t quite make it quite to the from page of this site.

Our RSS feed can bring the news from the front page of our site direct to your favorite news reader.  Stay informed on the latest from Engine Audio.

As always you can reach us by email at info@engineaudio.com.  Send us an email and let us know what you think of the redesign.

Beyond our home here on the the net.  Here are some of the other great sites that we frequent.  They are some of the most helpful resources discussing audio for game on the web. The group of people that frequent these site are industry professionals.  We try to contribute any way we can,  but mostly we are there to learn something new.

Game Audio Forum

FMOD Forum

ModDB

Epic Games Forum

Recently we went into the recording studio to get some new sounds recorded.  There was enough ideas to keep rolling for hours.  We setup to record laser blasts and solid bow and sword foley. In our homage to Ben Burtt we set up a spring to get interesting sources for lasers blasts.  The spring was suspended from a ladder so that it didn’t touch any other surface.  Then it was struck with with a variety of different object and from all angles.

Engine Audio is also preparing sounds for new medieval battle Unreal 3 Mod called Archasis.  The main character wields an assortment of sword and bow weapons.  We started recording a metal impacts and foley for the first soundbank.

We captured the whole session at 24bit/96k in ProTools using a single mono shotgun mic. We also used a Sound Devices 722t running a stereo mic at the same bit depth and sample rate.  The hi quality recording work well since each sound fx  will be going through a lot of processing before it ends up as the final product.

The guys over at HongKiat have come up with a thorough list of websites with free sound fx available.  If you are in need of good sources or ideas for sound design you can find some sounds worth using.  Don’t expect consistent quality from all the sites, you do get what you pay for, but with this sort of variety you are bound to find something useful.

Check it out:

http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/55-great-websites-to-download-free-sound-effects/

Some examples form the list:

SoundSnap – User-submitted library of sounds

AudioMicro – A source of micro sized stock sounds and music

Sound-Effect.com -quality  hand-picked selection of sounds

FindSounds.com – a search engine for finding sounds online

Simon Ahsby and the team at Audiokinetic continue to push the boundaries of Game Audio integration with their amazing toolset WWISE.

WWISE is an audio tool set that was developed with the sound designer and composer as its focus. Audiokinetic offers WWISE as a bridge between the world of Digital Audio Workstations (Pro Tools, Logic Audio) and the code driven world of a game audio pipeline.

For those of us who are experienced with audio tools for Music and Media Postproduction, the introduction of WWISE onto the scene has been exciting to say the least. Keeping with this trend, the team at WWISE is proud to present a module (plug in) that will expand the power of WWISE as a sound design medium.

The first module, SoundSeed Impact, can be used to create variations of resonant impact sounds, such as sword clings, footsteps, bells, etc. Audiokinetic promises to deliver Impact shortly and is already working on creating additional modules.

“Too often, sound designers must set aside their creativity in order to comply with memory usage or recording costs constraints,” says Audiokinetic CEO and president André Nadeau. “SoundSeed breaks this paradigm.”

A very tongue in cheek look at Wii Music from SarcasticGamer.com. They crack on the limited music selection in the game, all songs are either from Nintendo or the public domain. How many different ways can you play the Super Mario Bros. theme? There is also the flailing that come naturally with any Wii game, there is no real instrument to play so the controls may take some getting used to. With game like Guitar Hero: World Tour and Rock Band 2 on the shelves it sounds like Wi Music might have a tough time competing with a popular mix of licensed music and plastic instruments.