The Essential Guide to Game Audio

I read this book page by page cover to cover and I can say that about 20% of the info in here was useful to me. There seems to be a ton of filler. The authors will explain a topic like mobile games by starting like "What even is an iPhone? There once was a great man named Steve...". I'm pretty sure that anybody considering a career in game audio probably already knows what an XBox 360 is, you don't have to spend a paragraph and a photo explaining that one. The companion app worked as intended about 50% of the time, and the links to the supplemental materials are all broken and outdated. You can still find them by googling around a little though. The chapters ("levels"...cool) that deal with Unity are kind of useful, but they are very much a "repeat after me" style of learning one specific application, and you won't truly understand the software upon completing them. Honestly your time is better spent following the many tutorials on YouTube. The other thing I could see myself using this book for in the future is the specific file formats and bit rates etc. of different platforms, but this is info I'm sure I could find quicker and more accurately with a quick Google search. I have no doubt that the authors of this book are incredible knowledgeable and professional, but the information presented here leaves much to be desired.

This book is excellent in construction and presentation. I'm so happy to have a book that presents concepts in logical fashion. I know some audio technology from school but more as a musician and composer, not as an engineer. This gives basic and well thought out definitions both in conception and examples. Finally someone seems to understand exactly the way my brain works and learns. It's an overarching 'here's stuff you need to grasp.' I've only spent about a half hour with it so far and have already picked up a great deal. I'll be back to write more later once I've read more but note: the companion app is named "Essential Game Audio."

More of an overview, than an in-depth procedural discussion. But still some good info.

YES

The first time a game's sound ever really blew me away was Super Mario Land on the Game Boy, way back in the late 80s. Although it wasn't the most sophisticated of productions, the music was some of the best music Nintendo ever put out in a game of the era, second only to the legendary Tetris cover of "Korobeiniki", in part because unlike the NES, which only had the one mono channel going to TVs with only one speaker, the Game Boy had a stereo headphone jack, and Gunpei Yokoi's sound team took as full advantage as was possible with 8-bit beeps and buzzes and two channels.The better part of thirty years later, audio production for even amateurs has become both cheap and very sophisticated indeed; witness the remarkable talents for abuse of binaural microphones that characterize popular ASMRtists on YouTube and the ubiquity of the well-regarded FOSS audio editor Audacity. The proportion of phone and tablet games that instruct you to use headphones for best effect is large and increasing, and there's even a small genre (originally created for the blind) of audio-only games based entirely on 3D sound. This book (and its accompanying app) is the best guide going for learning how to handle these things.The book focuses particularly on the Unity game engine; it's a relatively new but widely used engine that's free for basic desktop development. Although it probably helps to be familiar with traditional studio production, you don't really need to be to get the most out of it, especially since it focuses heavily on user experience, something only a very few music producers specializing in surround sound need to give a lot of thought to. The extensive coverage of the history of both sound recording and video games should make it a sufficiently interesting read even for people who just want to learn a bit about the process without actually becoming a game developer as well. There's a lot of links to relevant websites and other resources for both game development and sound engineering, so you won't feel high and dry at the end.I did find a couple of minor irritants. It covers FOSS codecs like Ogg Vorbis, but doesn't talk about FOSS tools like the above-mentioned Audacity. It mentions audio-only games, but although the book and app do an excellent job of showing how 3D sound works, the closest thing to a demonstration is a maze minigame that tells you how far you've strayed from the correct path by increasingly dissonant strings being played over the music track. That's pretty cool, but I feel like you should be able to play it in eyes-closed mode, and I'm not convinced you can. However, these are all relatively minor, and this book isn't any less a good investment despite them.

This ought to be called AN INTRODUCTION TO GAME AUDIO, since it is a bit more precise. Some of the chapters are pretty technical, but a large number are not. Whether accessible to a general readership or to someone with extensive technical knowledge, every section is very nicely designed and attractively illustrated. The book is also clearly written.It is not a perfect book and that is why it gets four stars. There is no back material except for an index. No glossary of terms. No bibliography. So while this may be the only book directly on its subject, it isn't as helpful as it very easily could have been.

I got this book because I've done a bit of short voice spots but would like to get into narration. I thought I might be able to pick up some knowledge and tips from this book and indeed, I did. There's a nice section on voice recording.The book has very good illustrations and plenty of them. A lot of the concepts are explained primarily through the illustrations, which make the topics rather easy to understand, in my opinion.The book is fine for absolute beginners, and I think it would be fine for teens and very smart younger kids that are into voice mods, or anyone with an interest in voice overs. It covers concepts as easy as file types to harder topics like achieving 3d sound.The progression in the book is logical, and the topics build on each other in subsequent chapters. That said, people already familiar with recording and sound work should be able to skip to topics that interest them.I learned a lot of new vocabulary, and some helpful voice recording tricks. Highly recommend!

Aimed at college level of study, not much new information in it for me studying at Hnrs Degree level but a good read all the same.

I was looking for a book teaching me essential insights about game audio. But it stayed and remained on a very high level with lots of superficial information. The booker covers many different topics like the history of sound in games (why do all these books start with a broad history round, I'm interested how things are done today!), audio basics, audio formats, game engines, mentions of middleware and broad tips about how to get into the business. I wanted to learn about making sound for games and techniques, how game engines really work and "think", how to tackle sound repetition, techniques for repetition making, proper sound looping. But the book only mentions everyting on a very high level. Yeah, there are these audio formats and they differ in file size. Along those lines. And most chapters are tackled like in this broad way. And even the chapter about showing how to make a loop is very superficial and not even a good technique in my opinion. Then it goes on to show a little how audio works in Unity 3D, but doesn't mention other engines too much, only that they exist. And it doesn't mention how to overcome some of Unity's big shortcomings when it comes to audio. How sound is really implemented. Instead, the book goes on to give you some high level advice about how to get a job. Short form: do great work and get to know people. At this very high level, you can find all the info on the net when you google a bit. I hoped for a more in-depth "essential" and coherent journey into sound making techniques for games. Not for a broad laundry list of incoherent superficial information.