Automatically Generating Beat / Kick / Snare / High Markers for FMOD Events

FMOD Studio
1

Hi everyone,

We’re using FMOD for our Unreal Engine project and are trying to avoid any third-party audio-analysis plugins. Our goal is to rely fully on FMOD to drive gameplay-related visualization and VFX.

Right now we haven’t found a way to make FMOD AudioLink work with submixes in a way that gives us usable spectrum data for real-time visualization. Because of that limitation, we are currently sending over four simple key events from FMOD to Unreal:

  • Kick

  • Bass

  • High

  • Beat (based on BPM)

We then store the timestamp of each latest event in UE and lerp those values into a small “fake spectrum” (with some procedural noise added). This actually works great for our visual effects, but the workflow is extremely tedious because we have to manually place all those markers across the entire soundtrack.

While searching for a solution, we found this script:
https://github.com/jeremyabel/fmod-midi-to-markers
Unfortunately it’s 6 years old, no longer works, and doesn’t seem actively maintained.

Our question:
Is there any current tool, script, or FMOD workflow that can automatically generate marker keys for kick/bass/snare/high events, either from MIDI or from some sort of built-in analysis? Or any recommended modern approach to automate marker generation without relying on UE marketplace plugins?

We’d really appreciate any guidance or up-to-date solutions from the community.

Thanks in advance!

2

We aren’t aware of any tools or scripts that can handle this inside FMOD Studio, some applications like FL Studio have paid plugins for this kind of feature.

In FMOD you can gain access to TIMELINE_MARKER and TIMELINE_BEAT callbacks.

Maybe I can help you with this part, you should be able to route any sounds from UE to FMOD through Events (Programmer Sounds) which you can then access the spectrum data for things like visualizations. Was it not fitting your needs or just not working correctly?