Can't play new AudioClips added to an Audio Table without first rebuilding banks in Studio

We’re in the process of integrating FMOD into our Unity game and have run a workflow issue using Audio Tables and Programmer Instruments for dialogue that we’re hoping to get some help with:

We’ve set up an audio table pointing to a specific folder in our Unity project, but when we add audioClips to that folder they don’t get added to the associated bank (and therefore can’t be played via programmer instrument) until the banks are rebuilt via FMOD Studio. Is there a way to rebuild the banks or to get these clips from the audio tables playable by FMOD using only Unity so our audio engineer doesn’t have to pull the project and rebuild the banks every time we add new dialogue audio clips?

For context, we’ve been using https://fmod.com/resources/documentation-studio?version=2.00&page=dialogue-and-localization.html as our basis.

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There is no way to play sound files from a bank unless they are encoded into that bank, and no way to rebuild a bank without having the FMOD Studio project for that bank.

However, you could potentially use your programmer instruments to play loose audio files from the drive instead of files from an audio table. This is simple to set up, and will allow your audio engineer to play arbitrary files from code without having to rebuild the banks. The disadvantage of this method is that because the files are not built into your banks, they will not benefit from being in a bank: They will not be encoded and compressed as other files in your bank are, and will not automatically be loaded when you load your banks.

Of course, nothing’s stopping you from using the above method during development, then switching to using audio tables for the release version of your game once you have finalized the sound files to be included in your audio tables, in order to get the best of both worlds. It’d require slightly more effort, though.

I see, thank you for that explanation, Joseph.

Can you point me toward any examples or API I could use to prototype the method you mentioned, playing loose audio files via my programmer sounds? I might end up creating an editor tool that lets us switch in between them while in-Editor.

The Programmer Sounds example that comes with the FMOD API includes examples of programmer instruments being used to play loose audio files.