Tsugi

At Tsugi, we provide audio R&D and consulting services to game, VR and movie studios. We visit their audio departments, sit down with the sound designers and try to get a better understanding of their workflow, both in general and in the context of their current project: what are their most common tasks, how do they tackle them, what are the bottlenecks and what technologies are they missing. We then write a report and make recommendations. The team can implement these changes with our help, ask us to do it for them or just leave it at that for the time being. Often, we end up developing new types of tools in the process, which is exactly what happened with the Audio Dashboards. The idea behind the Audio Dashboards came from a couple of observations during these visits: Often, the GUI of the audio middleware / internal tool is not the most adequate for the project or for the team. A middleware company must cater to the wishes of the many and their solution cannot be the most efficient or intuitive for a given project. As for audio internal tools, they are often considered fine as long as they can export the data correctly. In mid-sized audio teams and bigger audio departments, it is not rare to have sound designers working on a specific type of content for a game: Foley, weapons, ambiences etc… Therefore, they always use the same subset of features of the middleware and the other ones are in the way. Sometimes the information the sound designers need is simply not available in the tool, or they would like to see it presented in a different way. Maybe they would like to see a pie chart representing the memory consumption per sound bank. Or maybe they would like a more immediate and graphic way to setup random containers and assign a weight to the different assets.