Streamlined Digital Audio Workstation inspired multi-track music and sound effect editing interface
Are you tired of game audio editors that look like a spreadsheet? If you’re new to game audio, or come from a background where you’ve used graphical sound design tools like Logic/Ableton/Pro Tools, FMOD Studio provides you with a familiar, easy to use interface that you can jump straight into, and create highly detailed, more professional results in a fraction of the time.
FMOD Studio’s streamlined interface cleans up your screen real estate, letting you focus solely on creating great audio. The multi-track editor allows you to create complex/varied events, and interactive music, in the same interface with minimal effort and less resources. Every event, event track, and bus has a graphical effect deck, which allows you to add pro level effects, position them anywhere you want in the signal, and control the output of the entire event.
Fully featured professional mixing desk for mastering
FMOD Studio’s mixing desk will be immediately familiar to audio professionals who have used Digital Audio Workstations before. Buses can be represented as channel strips, and you can even use your favorite hardware control surface to control it! Each bus comes with a configurable effect deck with full effect and panning control, and professional 7.1 EBU R-128 compliant loudness metering.
Create mixer snapshots, which allows you to stage mix setups for particular moments in your game. With logic dictated purely by the sound designer, you can easily duck all audio when a voice over happens, or filter part of the mix while playing an overlay sound for professional spot based mix effects. You can even use side-chaining from any bus to control the rest of the mix!
FMOD Studio’s mixer comes with a suite of professional tools for mixing: VCAs, sends and returns, side-chaining, 15+ dsp effects, graphical panners and real-time analysis of your game audio while it runs.
Live in-game mixing, tweaking and creation while the game runs
FMOD Studio’s live in-game support gives you the ultimate in creativity and control. Experience the mood change and view the action as you create, add, edit and mix audio content – all in real-time. The ability to author your audio content live in-game gives you the ultimate in control. Create, add, edit and mix audio content with precise timing and efficiency. FMOD Studio takes care of your build live, as you work, which means that you can instantly preview your results without that annoying edit, rebuild, restart cycle. The immediacy of both creation and preview will reduce the time you spend creating and debugging your audio content. For the first time you will get a real sense of your audio coming alive while the game is running.
FMOD Studio has revolutionized audio debugging
FMOD Studio’s interactive profiler has changed the way you author content for your game. Rather than blindly handing a project over to the team to be implemented, the sound designer can be hands on, playing, recording and visualizing all audio content, while connected to the game. As the FMOD Studio profiler is connected to the game, it records all game audio and lets you play back the audio from within the tool. You can even scrub back through and listen to the recorded session, and above that see all levels for busses and events, triggers and their lifetimes, and cpu/memory overhead. All laid out on a time line using the profiler’s multi-track interface.
- Introducing Instant Replay
FMOD Studio’s profiler not only records the waveform and profile information for levels/cpu/trigger points and memory, it also records every API call made in the game to drive the audio. A button in the profiler lets you switch between API capture mode, and normal profile mode, while the profiler is replaying your session. What does this mean? You can now disconnect from the game, replay the recording in API mode, and actually remix your replay and change sounds, levels, parameters, curves and more.
A flexible interactive music system that warps time and space
Don’t be tied into a fixed one purpose music system. Explore the flexibility of FMOD Studio’s interactive music engine which shares the same interface as the event editing system. Yes, this also means you can give game sound effects musical timing and parameterized branching.
- Beats, Bars and Branching
Quantization and Branching are a snap with sounds having their own quantization settings, and by dropping transition markers and regions into your timeline, you can make sounds branch on the mood of the game.
- Transition timelines
Introducing Hyper-time. On a music transition, open the timeline into a new dimension, where it switches to a new sub-timeline where you can add cross fades, insert new sounds and musical tracks. The Transition timeline can be randomized and parameterized, so your tracks should never sound the same twice.
Next level 3D Sound
FMOD Studio’s 3D engine has multiple features which will make your audio stand out. FMOD Studio isn’t just content with basic 3D positioning, it includes unique features which make sense for games and interactive media.
- Polygon based geometry engine that occludes and filters sound in realtime
FMOD’s run-time engine is the only audio engine that allows you to provide it with polygon data, making the sound automatically occlude and filter as you move through the world. This astounding feature gives new levels of realism without compromise. Audio is not just attenuated, it is also low-pass filtered to give that extra touch of realism, such as the effect of thumping bass coming through walls but not the high frequencies.
FMOD Studio is not just limited to polygons, you can define mesh objects that can be rotated, scaled and translated in real-time to attach to your in-game objects.
- Multiple Listener support for split screen games
FMOD Studio provides your game with advanced split-screen support. Define multiple camera locations and FMOD Studio will smartly pan the audio based on the point of view of multiple audio listeners, so it is not confusing even when the listener orientations conflict with each other.
- Multiple preset roll-off curve types, and custom roll-off curve support
FMOD Studio provides you with choice on how they want to attenuate your 3D audio. Choose from linear squared, linear, inverse curve, inverse curve with tapering, and custom. You can attach a custom volume envelope, or even a DSP filter curve to an automatic distance parameter for ultimate control.
- Distance driven parameters
FMOD Studio provides the ability for you to add your own game parameters, but it also has special built in ‘automatic’ parameters. One of those is the ‘distance’ parameter. You can do anything you like related to the this parameter: control volume curves, play sounds or alter controls for randomization. The possibilities are endless. On top of distance, elevation, event cone angle, direction according to the listener, and event orientation are also supported.
- Smooth blending between 2D and 3D settings
FMOD Studio’s 3D panner not only allows you to pan sounds in 3D, but also blend between a 3D and 2D mix. The 2D/3D mix can be controlled by any parameter including automatic parameters such as distance. Have 3D sounds suddenly morph into a surround 2D mix to envelop the listener. Great for volumetric sounds!
- HRTF headphone 3D audio via AstoundSound 3D RTI and Plugins
FMOD provides 3D headphone audio via third party plugins. Get your users immersed in the mix by using advanced processing algorithms that spatialize audio over 2 speakers, for precise positioning and enhanced spatial separation of noisy scenes.
Complex sound control. Treat events as components. Events inside events inside events…
Don’t be fooled by FMOD Studio’s easy to use interface, once you dive in you’ll find unlimited power lies beneath with the way you author sound effects or music.
- Single sound, multi-sound, scatterer sounds, programmer sounds
Not only can you drop in wave files (and any other type of sound file), you can add ‘multi-sounds’, with randomization and playback control. Go even further with a scatterer sound, and spawn sounds randomly and continuously with sample accurate precision. If you want to add a sound that is selected by the programmer at run-time, you can do this with ‘programmer sounds’.
- Event sounds
Not only can you have sounds that randomize and play back the way you want them to, you can embed whole complex events, in the place of a single sound file, in an event track, multi sound, or scatterer sound. Imagine the possibilities if automated/modulated event sounds contained other automated/modulated event sounds, without limit, and you can start to imagine the in depth possibilities available.
- Modulation. Randomize, envelope, side-chain your controls
Many controls (i.e. dials on a filter or a volume/pitch control for example) have the ability to be modulated with a variety of methods. AHDSR envelopes let you adjust a control over time, randomization lets you never have a control repeat with the same value twice, and side-chaining is a powerful tool that lets you use the audio signal from a bus to adjust your control in realtime!