FMOD Studio Review

5 2

Review of FMOD Studio powered by the Slant community.

FMOD Studio is an audio content creation tool for games, with a focus on a ‘Pro Audio’ approach. It has an entirely new interface that will be more familiar to those using professional Digital Audio Workstations than existing game audio tools and is loaded with new features.

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Pros

Pro
Cross-platform

Windows, Windows Phone, Mac OS X, iOS, Android, Linux, PS3, PS4, PSVita, Xbox 360, Xbox One, Wii U

Pro
Studio interface presents a lot on one view really well

Compared to Wwise, for example, which splits the parameter curves that may be affecting your event into at least three different views, FMOD does a good job of flattening the hierarchy, simplifying details into nice UI gadgets, and presenting all this on one view. This may create a bit of a disconnect in understanding the hierarchy... but not really. Details may be hidden because of this but those probably aren't missed by your average developer. Showing the waveforms of the clips everywhere possible also helps. The contrast and readability of the UI is also nice.

Pro
Unreal game engine integration fully supported

Pro
Unity game engine integration fully supported

Well, fully supported except for parameterized one-shot events through FMOD's Unity components, and lack of good getting started documentation showing best practices for various needs.

Pro
Autopitch modulator

Easy to automate pitch bending with an RPM parameter, for example. Far easier to use and understand than Wwise's Smart pitch curve command. No idea which is more efficient, however.

Pro
Used in many high profile commercial games

Pro
Free license for non-commercial/educational/indies (budget < $100k)

Pro
Already integrated with many game engines

Cons

Con
Not enough sensitivity in randomized playlists

The smallest chance of random play is 1%. This may be fine enough for most situations but if, for example, you have 20 clips to randomize and you want one of them to play 1:10 of the rest, you would need ~0.5%. And if you want an Easter-egg event at 1:100, you can't get even close to that. You'll have to do it in code instead of in the studio.

Con
Unclear on how to handle parameterized one-shot events in Unity

The instructions on how to set up events in Unity work for all events except one-shot events that need to respond to a parameter. These events should be implemented through code instead of using the FMOD Unity components (like you can for all other events). This makes no sense from a design point and is not made clear in any documentation. You might as well implement all of FMOD through code in Unity and ignore the clumsy Unity components.