Top Game Audio Tools

A game can’t be fun without good sound, music, and sound effects. You need game audio tools that allow you to create your own sounds, use sound effects from their preset libraries, as well as manage these sounds in-game to deliver the ultimate experience to your users.

Below is a comprehensive list of the top game audio tools as well as digital audio workstations (DAW) in 2020 to choose from based on need.

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Wwise is the most advanced, feature-rich interactive audio solution for games. Whether you’re an indie developer or a huge corporate, Wwise can work for everyone.

It features an audio authoring tool and a cross-platform sound engine, allows for on-the-fly audio authoring directly in game. You can create, audition, and tweak sound effects and behaviors while the game is being played.

• Developer: Audiokinetic
• Platforms: iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Windows, Mac, Playstation, Xbox and more
• Unity Support: Yes
• Games: Dirt Rally, Overwatch, Lucky’s Tale, EVE: Valkyrie
• Pricing: Free for companies with a production budeget below $250k. Paid licenses start at $7,000.

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FMOD is a sound effects engine for video games and applications that play and mix sound files of diverse formats on many operating systems.
With an intuitive visual interface, efficient workflow, and powerful collaboration tools, FMOD makes it easy to get rich interactive audio into your game. It also allows multiple team members to work on the same project at the same time.

• Developer: Firelight Technologies
• Platforms: iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Windows, Mac, Linux, Playstation, Xbox, Wii and more
• Unity Support: Yes
• Games: World of Warcraft, Guitar Hero III, Need for Speed: Shift, BioShock
• Pricing: Free for developers below $200k in revenue. Paid licenses start at $2,000.

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Fabric offers many audio features and custom user interfaces that allow developers to design great audio entirely within Unity. Its nested component hierarchy allows users to create complex audio structures and combined with its event based system, Fabric reduces dependency on programmers, giving more power to sound designers to work independently.

It provides a number of integrations with third party technologies, audio assets with complex behaviors ready to be used in games, as well as many extensions that can be added for additional functionality.

• Developer: Tazman-Audio
• Platforms: iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, Linux, PlayStation, Xbox, Wii and more
• Unity Support: Yes
• Games: Star Wars Uprising, The Walking Dead: No Man's Land, Hue
• Pricing: Free for projects below $250k. Paid licenses start at $500.

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The Miles Sound System is one of the most popular, sophisticated, most robust, and most fully featured sound systems for games out there. It has been licensed for over 6,000 games on 18 different platforms.

It offers a full-on toolset that integrates high-level sound authoring with 2D and 3D digital audio, featuring streaming, environmental and convolution reverb, multistage DSP filtering, and multichannel mixing, and highly-optimized audio decoders.

• Developer: Rad Game Tools
• Platforms: iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, Linux, Playstation, Xbox, Wii and more
• Games: Silent Storm: Sentinels, Metal of Honor Allied Assault, Duke Nukem Forever
• Pricing: Based on request (per game per platform)

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Nuendo established a new milestone in game audio production with the introduction of Game Audio Connect that first enabled transferring audio files to Wwise. It also allows you to transfer interactive sections of your compositions from Nuendo as music segments into Wwise, including audio and MIDI tracks as well as cycle and cue markers, opening up a whole new dimension for game sound composing.

You can also create Nuendo projects directly from Wwise segments, effectively allowing you to use Nuendo as a MIDI editor for Wwise.

• Developer: Steinberg Media Technologies
• Platforms: Windows, Mac
• Plugins: WWise
• Games: Pokemon Black & White, Tron: Evolution
• Pricing: Licenses start at €999

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Bfxr is a very simple open source tool that lets you create retro sound effects for games. The best thing about it is the how much you can play around with it and customize it, the possibilities are really endless.

• Developer: Bfxr
• Platforms: Windows, Mac
• Pricing: Free

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Adobe Audition is a comprehensive toolset that includes multitrack, waveform, and spectral display for creating, mixing, editing, and restoring audio content. This powerful audio workstation is designed to accelerate video production workflows and audio finishing, and deliver a polished mix with pristine sound.

Adobe Audition software includes thousands of uncompressed, royalty-free audio sound effects that you can incorporate in your game based on need.

• Developer: Adobe
• Platforms: Windows, Mac and Linux
• Pricing: Plans start at $20.99 per month

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KOMPLETE is one of the world’s leading collections for music production, performance, and sound design. All the tools you need for any production task, any type of music, anything you can imagine. It offers an enormous collection of inspiring and innovative virtual instruments and effects.
Its production suite contains 45 products, 13,000+ sounds, and over 155 GB of instruments and effects, while its supreme suite for pro audio production consists of 87 products, 18,000+ sounds, and over 500GB of instruments and effects.

• Developer: Native Instruments
• Platforms: Windows, Mac
• Pricing: Software license starts at $199 for the essential bundle and $599 for the standard product

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Audacity is a free, open source, cross-platform audio software for multi-track recording and editing. It can record live audio through a microphone or mixer, digitize recordings from other media, and capture streaming audio.

• Developer: The Audacity Team
• Platforms: Windows, Mac and Linux
• Pricing: Free

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Cubase is one of the most complete digital audio workstations, covering all stages of the creative process from composing, recording, editing, and mixing. Cubase excels with intelligent tools and features that put creativity first. Offering maximum flexibility, Cubase does not impose a certain workflow onto you, but provides the freedom you need to push your creative envelope.

Whether you are an expert or taking your first steps in digital music production, Cubase offers a set of tools that’ll fit all your needs, level of experience, or choice of music.

• Developer: Steinberg Media Technologies
• Platforms: Windows, Mac
• Games: Pokemon Black & White, Tron: Evolution
• Pricing: Software starts at €99.99

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REAPER is a complete digital audio production application offering a full multitrack audio and MIDI recording, editing, processing, mixing, and mastering toolset.

It supports a vast range of hardware, digital formats, and plugins, and can be comprehensively extended, scripted, and modified.

• Developer: Cockos
• Platforms: Windows, Mac
• Pricing: Free trial. Paid licenses start at $60 for developers below $20k revenue, and $225 for developers above the threshold.

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GarageBand is Apple's recording studio app complete with multitrack recording and numerous other features to help you record like a pro, making it incredibly simple to play, record, and export your music.

It offers a collection of touch instruments and a full-featured recording studio along with live Loops, which makes it easy for anyone to have fun creating music. It also offers a sound library to download additional free instruments, loops, and sound packs.

• Developer: Apple
• Platforms: iOS, Mac
• Pricing: Free

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SONAR allows you to easily compose complete tracks and music with its range of creative tools and instruments. You can capture recordings with pristine quality and unlimited audio and MIDI tracks, edit, fix mistakes, arrange parts, and manipulate pitch, time, and any other aspect of your recordings.

You can also achieve pristine pro-studio sounds and create big, clear, dynamic mixes with advanced mixing tools as well as polish your finished mixes to perfection with built-in mastering tools.

• Developer: Cakewalk
• Platforms: Windows
• Pricing: Software at $49.99

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Pro Tools make music creation and working on large audio post-production projects easier than ever, from tons of new MIDI enhancements to timesaving batch renaming capabilities and more. It enables collaboration on the cloud where you can easily share tracks and work on projects with anyone, anywhere.

From powerful new loop-based music creation and trying ideas via revision history to time-saving workflows that simplify editing and post production, it enables you to create and edit instantly on the go.

• Developer: Avid
• Platforms: Windows, Mac
• Pricing: Free product with essential features only. Paid plans start at $9.99 per month or $79 billed annually.