Amplitude Audio SDK vs Steam Audio SDK

Amplitude Audio SDK is a cross-platform audio engine for games, supporting audio for 2D, 3D, and VR/AR environments. It runs on Android, iOS, Linux, macOS, and Windows; Windows, Linux, and macOS are listed as runtime platforms. Project assets are defined in JSON and compiled into binary sound banks for runtime loading. Audio options include stereo panning, binaural rendering with user HRTF assets, and Ambisonic rendering. Developers can configure processing per runtime platform, including filters, room effects, and spatialization, and extend the pipeline with plugins. A MiniAudio-based default driver and MP3 and WAV decoding are included. Official integrations are listed for O3DE, ezEngine, Godot 4+, and Flax Engine. The SDK is free and open source under Apache-2.0, but it is in beta without an official release; nightly builds are for development, not production. Amplitude Studio is in early access with complimentary access during that phase; its planned free version has non-commercial and feature limits.

Steam Audio SDK is a free toolkit for adding spatial audio to games and VR/AR apps. It renders positional audio binaurally using HRTFs to model sound direction relative to the listener. Environmental features include physics-based sound propagation, occlusion, reflections and reverb. The SDK can spatialize Ambisonics audio and rotate it with listener orientation, and developers can provide HRTFs in AES SOFA format. Multicore CPUs and supported GPUs can accelerate environmental simulation and rendering. Listed integrations include Unity, Unreal Engine, FMOD Studio, Wwise and a C API. The C API is intended for custom game engines, audio middleware and digital audio workstations, and can be called from languages that use external libraries. Supported systems include Windows, Linux, macOS, Android and iOS; SteamOS is also listed as a runtime platform. Integration requirements include Unity 2017.3 or later, Unreal Engine 4.27 or later, FMOD Studio 2.00 or later and Wwise 2023.1.0 or later. The project describes its development tools as being in Beta. Steam Audio is available free to developers, subject to a license agreement.