First, you’ll need to download the Unreal plug-in from the Meta Horizon Developer Center. Once downloaded, extract the .zip to a local folder on your machine.

Install Unreal Engine

The first step to get started using the Meta XR Audio SDK plugin for Unreal is to install the Unreal Engine using the Epic Games Launcher. Epic Games provides a full set of instructions on how to set up and account and navigate to the download for your desired version here⁠.

The minimum Unreal Engine version that we support for this plugin is:

Unreal Engine 5.1.1

We also test the plug-in works in the latest version of Unreal for each release. The plugin may work in versions earlier in than the minimum version, but there is no support provided for that use case.

Add MetaXRAudio plugin to a project or Unreal Engine

The downloaded SDK package contains a sub-folder titled “Unreal” and inside it the plugin is found at “MetaXRAudio”. You can either copy the plugin to “UnrealEnginePath\Engine\Plugins\Marketplace" to add it to your engine and make it available to all projects, or copy it to “YourProjectPath\Plugins” to make it available only to a specific project.

Note that you should not install the plugin for both the engine and a project as this is not recommended by Epic Games. Also note that you should not have multiple instances of different Meta audio plugins both active. For example, don’t install both the Meta XR Audio Wwise for Unreal plugin and the Meta XR Audio FMOD for Unreal plugin at the same time.

Activate MetaXRAudio plugin in a project

In your Unreal project, the first thing to do is activate the Meta XR Audio plugin so that it becomes available for usage. Navigate to edit > plugins and find the Meta XR Audio plugin in the list of available plugins as shown below and make sure it is checked:

Unreal plugin settings with Meta XR Audio plugin activated.

You may need to restart the editor for this change to take effect.

Repackaing for a different version of Unreal Engine

The plugin is always pre-built with the latest version of Unreal Engine. When you try to load the plugin in an earlier version of Unreal, it will recognize the difference and ask if you want to rebuild the plugin for this version. In most cases you can confirm this and it will automatically rebuild without issue. If it fails to automatically repackage the plugin for your version you can run the following script included in the Unreal Engine to repackage it:

C:\Program Files\Epic Games\UE_5.3\Engine\Build\BatchFiles\RunUAT.bat BuildPlugin -plugin="C:\Downloads\MetaXRAudio\MetaXRAudio.uplugin" -package="C:\temp\MetaXRAudio"

In the above command make sure the path to the RunUAT.bat file matches the version of the Unreal Engine you’d like to package for, the plugin arguement matches the path to the MetaXRAudio.uplugin file on your directory, and the package arguement is a valid output path to place the result at.

Take careful note before you repackage to check that the original package has the file MetaXRAudio/Config/FilterPlugin.ini and it has the following text inside it:

[FilterPlugin]
/Binaries/Win64/metaxraudio64.dll

Without this file, the repackaging process will delete the metaxraudio64.dll file and your project will open with an error that it could not find this file. Another solution is that you may simply copy MetaXRAudio/Binaries/Win64/metaxraudio64.dll to your repackaged plugin instead of using the filtering method.