Investigate possible improvements to the Audio systems in Godot.

[CarpenterBlue]

The way audio is handled at the moment is very un-intuitive.

• you have to have node in a scene.
  This is kind of pointless. 90% of the time, you end up playing the audio from code or animation player anyway and requires you to have a node path of the audio player node.
  This is required for there to be locational sound however there should still be a way to play audio from code, this would be especially useful for in-game menus.

• This node need/must to have one stream assigned to it.
  This makes it harder to update sound across the game and you can assign only one stream.

• If you play the audio before it's finished, it's cut off
  I have yet to encounter case where this is actually desired.

I propose that there is one central Audio map in project settings that would work similarly to the Input Map.
Set up Alias and add stream/(maybe even multiple streams). The nodes in the scene tree just handle the playing and the sound is not cut off unless specified.

[Calinou]

This is required for there to be locational sound however there should still be a way to play audio from code, this would be especially useful for in-game menus.

See #1472 where I proposed adding a SceneTreeAudioStreamPlayer. Positional playback is a challenge indeed, and may not be feasible at all with this approach though. Still, it's fine for UI sounds and some gameplay sounds (such as announcer voices).

This node need/must to have one stream assigned to it.
This makes it harder to update sound across the game and you can assign only one stream.

The general approach is to use multiple nodes to allow for parallel playback, or a single node with AnimationPlayer with audio playback tracks if multiple sounds don't need to play at the same time.

If you play the audio before it's finished, it's cut off
I have yet to encounter case where this is actually desired.

Set Polyphony above 1 in the AudioStreamPlayer to avoid this. The default is 1 to avoid performance issues if your sound has silence near the end.

I propose that there is one central Audio map in project settings that would work similarly to the Input Map.

I don't think this is the right approach. Configuration should be done as locally as possible unless there's a good reason to make it project-wide (e.g. for localization remaps).

[CarpenterBlue]

See #1472 where I proposed adding a SceneTreeAudioStreamPlayer. Positional playback is a challenge indeed, and may not be feasible at all with this approach though. Still, it's fine for UI sounds and some gameplay sounds (such as announcer voices).

SceneTreeAudioStreamPlayer is a good idea. Perhaps the SceneTreeAudio could be bound to 2D/3D nodes to follow them. But in general, I would be fine with having nodes for that.

The general approach is to use multiple nodes to allow for parallel playback, or a single node with AnimationPlayer with audio playback tracks if multiple sounds don't need to play at the same time.

I just use node.duplicate() on the AudioStreamPlayer and delete it once it played 9/10 times I need to play sound. It's the simplest way of handling the sounds I figured

Set Polyphony above 1 in the AudioStreamPlayer to avoid this. The default is 1 to avoid performance issues if your sound has silence near the end.

Perhaps in the future but I am finishing a project that's stuck on 3.x still.

I don't think this is the right approach. Configuration should be done as locally as possible unless there's a good reason to make it project-wide (e.g. for localization remaps).

Heavily disagree on this point. It's pain to handle lot of audio that needs changing. I also was taught lesson that built-in scripts (which i use for one off buttons) don't show up in the global find and replace so I had to find them manually. Besides, writing the full audio path (it may change) is obviously bad idea.