Hello! Is it possible to have a single track that, at fixed points in the music, switches between different audio files without jumping in the timeline? The idea here is that there is a bed track that starts from the beginning, and ALWAYS plays through to the end, no matter what happens.
But there is another track on top that that switches between different instruments. However, I don’t want these instruments to switch as soon as a variable changes, but rather it “checks” the variable at various points (which I manually set). If the variable is one thing, it chooses to play one track, if the variable is another thing, it choose another.
Here’s a picture of what I’m talking about, which will hopefully make it easier to understand what I’m saying. A red bar and a blue bar never play at the same time, just check every once in a while what variable “A” is. If it is 1, it choose a red bar. If it is 2, it chooses a blue bar. Remember that I’d like it so that the music doesn’t jump to different points, it just goes from start to finish, but it chooses different chunks based on the variable at fixed points.
Does this make sense and is it possible? Thanks in advance!
You should be able to accomplish this by using event instruments.
Create an event that performs this transition between tracks using a parameter. Drag this event from the events browser into your music event. You should now be able to control the referenced event in the music event. For more information, please see our documentation:
https://fmod.com/resources/documentation-studio?version=2.0&page=working-with-instruments.html#event-instruments
Thanks, Richard, for your reply! I tried out your idea, and am wondering if I did what you were thinking. It does seem to work as I had intended! “River” is stem A and “Earth” is stem B.
If this is what you intended, is this really the most efficient way to do it? It’s not too bad for just 2 stems, but in the final product there will be 8 separate stems that the music can switch between at those fixed points. This means that for each one, I’d have to setup a multiple transition jumps and multiple destination makers, and ensure that they are all in the exact right position so that the music doesn’t start to get out-of-sync.
I was imagining something more along the lines of a Multi Instrument, where I just simply stack the stems on top of each other, and then at fixed points give conditions for which one to go to next. However, it seems that a Multi Instrument can only choose either randomly or sequentially to me.
Do you have any further ideas to make the process a bit simpler?
Much appreciated! 
I was only allowed one image per post, but I also wanted to include this, which shows what the zoomed-out event looks like that contains the SpiritLead event:
For tempo-sensitive samples such as this you can use quantized transition regions. You can also try slicing up the samples and using automated track volumes or placing the instruments on a parameter sheet for simplicity.
Another option is to have all the audio tracks running in parallel, and give them trigger conditions which determine which are playing. For that to work, your game’s code will have to only change the parameter value at the specific intervals when you want a switch in which music’s playing to be possible, which might be hard to set up on the code side.
Hi Richard, thanks for the reply!
We ended up going with the programming method that you suggested. I am a programmer myself, so I’m not uncomfortable with this option, and it seems to work. We have a list in Unity of all the points at which the leads should switch, and then it sets the parameters at those moments. Thanks for suggesting it!
I’m not really sure what you mean by a “parameter sheet”. Is there an example of this?
Glad that helped. A parameter sheet is what you visually see your content on such as a timeline or a parameter. For more information, take a look at our docs.
https://www.fmod.com/resources/documentation-studio?version=2.0&page=glossary.html#parameter-sheet
