ValveSoftware/steam-audio

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

2956 stars · 257 forks observed · 2026-10-02

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

Steam Audio is Valve's open-source spatial audio SDK providing physics-based sound propagation, occlusion, reflection, reverb, and HRTF-based binaural 3D audio for games and VR. It ships as a C++ core library with integrations for Unity, Unreal Engine, FMOD Studio, and Wwise across desktop and mobile platforms.

Use cases

• add spatial audio to a Unity game
• render HRTF binaural 3D sound in VR
• simulate sound occlusion and reverb from scene geometry
• integrate physics-based sound propagation into Unreal Engine
• add immersive audio to an FMOD or Wwise project
• build low-latency 3D audio for mobile VR apps

When to choose

• you need end-to-end spatial audio with propagation, occlusion, and reverb in a game or VR app
• you use Unity, Unreal, FMOD, or Wwise and want a free Apache-2.0 audio SDK
• you need cross-platform support including Android and iOS
• accurate HRTF-based binaural rendering matters for VR immersion

When to avoid

• you need a full audio engine rather than a spatialization middleware
• your project targets platforms outside Windows, Linux, macOS, Android, or iOS
• you want a purely handcrafted non-physical audio pipeline with no simulation

Facets

library · maturity active

audio-processing sdk plugin-system simulation graphics cross-platform windows cpp game-engine spatial-audio hrtf vr 3d-audio sound-propagation unity unreal-engine fmod wwise game-development audio linux macos android ios

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="ValveSoftware/steam-audio")