(NOTE: I’m still on FMOD 2.02 and haven’t yet tried 2.03, so if this is already a feature that I didn’t find the documentation for please link to it).
Hello,
In my DAW I was designing a looping sound that consists of chaining multiple individual variations (each with varying lengths) one after another and crossfading them to make to make a smooth transition between each. I had the idea of rather than rendering a baked loop, I could maximize variation by rendering the individual variations and in FMOD use a looping multi instrument with AHDSR crossfades.
However, it seems this is not currently possible for sounds that are of dissimilar lengths without making a really tedious transition marker configuration
From what I could find, these are the known workarounds (which only work well if your playlist items are of similar lengths):
- Async multi + AHDSR + Loop region (or marker transitions)
- Scatterer instrument crossfade workaround
- The most recent mention I could find on this subject was in May 2024 where Joseph from FMOD confirmed this feature still does not exist.
I suggest adding something like a “Playlist crossfades” button to the deck (see concept images below, I figure the icon would be either crossfade curves or a venn diagram to convey overlap):
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Activating it would bring up an AHDSR-like pane to adjust the global playlist crossfade properties.
- For full flexibility, if possible, I suggest also letting the user set crossfade overrides for specific playlist items via right-click “Custom playlist crossfade”.
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In the AHDSR-like pane, I suggest a “Start Offset” time property that controls at what relative point in the current playlist item will the next item start to fade in.
For example, if the current audio asset is 4 seconds and the crossfade start offset is 0%, then the next item will trigger immediately and they’ll both crossfade over 4 seconds; whereas if the crossfade start offset is 50% then the next item will trigger 2 seconds in and the crossfade will last 2 seconds (although if the current item has loop enabled the crossfade could last for longer according to the playlist crossfade settings).- For playlists in a timeline, it might also be useful to set the crossfade start offset as musical beat values (similar to the Delay/Quantization pane) rather than only percentage.
Playlist Crossfades - Rough Concept Mockups:
Those are all my thoughts. Thank you for reading my post.