Unreal Engine plugin

MetaSound Playground

A dockable editor plugin that gives your MetaSounds the listening room Unreal Engine never shipped.

Audition MetaSounds spatially (with real attenuation, distance filtering and live parameters) without ever entering Play-In-Editor.

Get it on FabRead the documentation

The problem

Unreal's native preview plays every MetaSound flat and centered, with spatialization disabled. Hearing a sound the way a player will means tweak, enter PIE, walk to the emitter, listen, exit, repeat. That's 30 to 60 seconds a pass, or a throwaway test level.

So attenuation gets estimated instead of tuned, spatial problems surface late, and the mix ships as a compromise.

What it does

The engine gives you MetaSounds. MetaSound Playground gives you a place to hear them: real positioned audio in one dockable window, spatialization and attenuation fully active, the listener synced to your viewport camera.

Drag the emitter across the XY pad and hear it sweep through its attenuation rings live: panning shifts, volume falls away, air absorption rolls in. The minute-long loop becomes a knob turn.

Features

Spatial audition

XY pad with attenuation rings
Inner radius, falloff and air-absorption zones drawn to scale, with zoom presets from 10 m to 2000 m.
Live curve graph
A dB-vs-distance plot with a moving position marker and a real-time low- and high-pass filter readout.
Embedded attenuation editor
Edit any SoundAttenuation property and the rings, the curve and the audio update instantly.
Inline configuration warnings
Mistakes like an inner radius larger than its falloff distance are flagged before they ship.

Live parameter control

Every input auto-exposed
Knobs, sliders, toggles, trigger buttons and dropdowns for every MetaSound input. All grouped, sortable and filterable.
Intelligent ranges
Frequency inputs get 20 Hz–20 kHz on a log scale, envelope times get 0–5 s. Override any range per asset.
Playback and Edit modes
Experiment without touching the asset, or write tuned values back as new defaults. Undo-aware throughout.

Transport and sequencing

DAW-style transport
Play, pause, stop and loop, with monophonic retrigger or polyphonic overlap, and Space to play.
Playground Events
Data-asset sequences that spawn, move with easing, re-parameterize and fade out sounds. Prototype whoosh-bys and ambient beds with no code and no PIE.
Three audio worlds
Audition in a self-contained preview scene, in the current editor level, or in live PIE. It switches automatically when you press Play.

Who it's for

  • Sound designers auditioning assets in space instead of guessing from a flat preview.
  • Technical sound designers tuning attenuation against a visible curve.
  • Audio programmers verifying event sequences before gameplay code exists.
  • Teams reviewing audio without booting the game.

Safe by design

  • Editor-only, so it adds nothing to packaged builds.
  • Non-destructive: Playback Mode never writes to your assets; Edit Mode writes only when you choose, with full undo.
  • No level pollution: preview indicators are transient and hidden from the outliner.

Getting started

  1. 1Enable the plugin.
  2. 2Open Tools → MetaSound Playground.
  3. 3Pick any MetaSound and press Space.

Requirements

Engine:
Unreal Engine 5.2 – 5.8
Platform:
Windows and macOS (editor only)

Edit Mode and reading authored parameter ranges require UE 5.5 or newer.

Full documentation

The complete manual: transport controls, the XY pad, parameter ranges, the event system, hotkeys and troubleshooting.

Read the documentation →