I am indeed, however as above, it exhibits the same issues as fades when used in a looped multi instrument.
Indeed. Before the bug is addressed, why don’t you simply bake the sounds in you DAW, since it seems you need a fixed modification on your sounds?
Well I’m trying to keep this as slim and efficient as possible, I suppose that’s doable. Alternatively I can create the transitions to shorter versions manually but they’ll be less seamless. Should work until the bug is fixed. Thanks for the help!
If you’re trying to conserve resources, you should definitely bake the effect into the sound in your DAW. All effects, modulators, and automation in FMOD are processed in real time, meaning that they consume resources while your game is running. If you want to reduce your game’s resource footprint, baking as much as possible into your assets is the way to go.
I’ve added this suggestion to our feature/improvement tracker - but be aware that we probably won’t implement it in the form that you’ve imagined.
Every asset in an event has to be loaded into memory for that event to play, and every effect and instrument consumes a small amount of CPU. A feature that allows users to add assets to an instrument but then specify that they should never play would encourage users to make events that consume extra memory and take longer to load, while providing no tangible benefit. It would also encourage users to clutter their events with content that has no effect on their in-game behavior, making those events harder to understand at a glance for anyone looking at them in FMOD Studio.
If we do implement this feature, therefore, we’ll probably make significant changes to it, with the aim of providing the benefit you’ve requested while minimizing or avoiding the disadvantages. We might reduce the impact of the first issue by automatically stripping unused assets out of events as part of building the project’s banks, for example, or implement a different feature that provides the same benefit (being able to quickly remove files from a playlist while having the option of re-adding them) while avoiding the clutter problem… Perhaps a pop-up menu that displays a list of files that were formerly part of a playlist before being deleted, so that you can easily re-add them, or something like that.
Roger that.
Out of curiosity, what’s the potential resource tradeoff between using something like 8 instances of a baked sound to achieve randomization vs an effect that utilizes 2-3 instances but relies on the built in plugins like say the Pitch effect?
Broadly speaking, that’s a tradeoff between CPU and memory. More assets consume more memory, while more effects consume more CPU time.
Using more assets in an event means it takes more memory to load that event’s assets. The amount of memory consumed by an event’s assets while they’re loaded into memory remains constant regardless of how many instances of the event are playing, so this option becomes more valuable the more simultaneous event instances you expect to be playing at once. (Unless those assets are streaming. Streaming assets consume very little memory but require constant disk I/O for each and every instance of the asset that’s playing, and so platforms can only handle a single-digit number of streaming asset instances at a time.)
Using more effects consumes more CPU. Each and every instance of an effect consumes CPU separately, and each instance of an event containing an effect must create its own instance of that effect, so this option becomes more valuable when only a small number of instances of the effect will be playing at once.
Sound designers usually find their CPU budget is more of a constraint than their memory budget, so if it comes down to a choice between consuming extra memory and consuming extra CPU, they’ll usually choose the former. However, every project has different requirements, every trade-off is slightly different, and resource budget is never the only constraint on a design, so there’s no universally-applicable best practices for this.
That clarified it considerably, thank you for that. I don’t suppose there’s a breakdown or a list of which effects are the most CPU expensive? I’m curious about the pitch shifter effect as I’ve been experimenting with that and I’ve yet to even come across a VST effect that produces that kind of randomization.
It’s not very handy but you can set the play percentage of some sounds to 0, then when you’re satisfied you remove those elements from the list.
Good idea, should be a decent enough alternative for now for the cost of a few extra clicks 
Not yet, but we’re working on it.