I am currently using a programmer instrument both for story dialogues and for regular NPC barks. While dialogues don’t require any randomization, barks usually have multiple variants e.g. taunt_01, taunt_02, taunt_03 and so on. Current approach is to just pass the programmer sound name + randomized number between 01 and whatever the highest number is, but this isn’t 100% reliable because the number of variants varies. Sometimes it’s 4, sometimes it’s 10.
Is it possible to assign multiple variants of a sound per key in an Audio Table? Something like
EnemyTaunt, VO/Enemy/Taunt_01.wav, VO/Enemy/Taunt_02.wav, VO/Enemy/Taunt_03.wav
so that the programmer have to simply call one key and it’ll randomly choose what to play like a multi-instrument?
If not, should I just move all barks into multis, and only use programmer instruments for story dialogues?
Using FMOD Studio 2.03.06 with Unreal Engine 5.
As of the time of writing (July of 2026), it is not possible for FMOD Studio to select which key a programmer instrument plays. Triggering a programmer instrument generates a callback; upon receiving that callback, your game’s code selects which key plays, including any randomness in that selection.
That being said, you’re not the first person to want to specify the key a programmer instrument plays at design time, nor the first to ask for the ability to randomly select from a list of keys. I’ll add your name to the lists of people interested in these features.
You can achieve the randomization you want by placing your Programmer Instruments into a Multi Instrument (exactly as you describe) and simply calling the event itself rather than the key. We did this on a LEGO game in 2023 and it worked beautifully across ~9 spoken languages! (Though keep in mind that if you are dealing with multiple languages, you’ll need the exact same number of variations across all languages for a given bark or it won’t work correctly.)