XACT Shared Settings

Titles have grown in complexity and this increase often requires several audio designers and composers to work on the same project. To help manage this complexity, the Microsoft Cross-Platform Audio Creation Tool (XACT) supports project sharing. Project sharing makes it possible for different sound designers to create and/or access the same XACT global properties.

If many sound designers are collaborating on multiple projects, several XACT objects must be shared across all the projects in order for XACT to work properly. These shared objects include:

• Global variables
• Local variables
• Categories
• DSP presets
• Compression presets
• RPC presets

Because any member of the design team for a game can change any of these shared properties, be very careful when changing properties of shared objects.

Import and Export of Shared Settings

The XACT File menu includes the following items to support shared settings:

• Import Shared Settings — Allows an XACT user to specify an output file that will contain all the global properties of their project. The file is stored in a simple .xap format.
• Export Shared Settings — Allows an XACT user to import and merge a global settings file that had previously been exported. If the imported file contains any non-global properties or objects, the import fails and an error message informs the user that the selected file is not an XACT Global Settings file.

Note    Only global (shared) data is exported to a global settings file, and only global data is read in when importing. Therefore, any non-global data, such as wave bank or sound bank information, is lost when syncing a shared settings file. Non-global data is lost from the shared settings file, not the current project.