FMOD beginner - recommend a tutorial?

Hi. I am a total beginner when it comes to making FMODs: my goal is to make one for X-Plane 11, including engine and cockpit switch/click sounds. I have downloaded the necessary software etc., and started a new project, but the only video I can find is this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nC1QZJaqRQM

It is certainly useful, but I am already getting a bit lost by the time she talks about adding parameters, 3 mins or so in. I will perhaps be able to work it all out eventually, but just wondering if any ‘old hand’ here may know of something that will go a bit more slowly: the video above assumes a level of knowledge that at the moment I do not have. I have multiple wav files as sources, startup sounds, engine running, shutdown, as well as non-engine-related files.

Googling comes up with almost nothing, so…

Thank you.

You’ll find a short introductory tutorial on FMOD Studio here. It guides you through all the important features and introduces the concepts you’ll need to do anything else in FMOD Studio.

If you have any questions about that tutorial, or find parts of it puzzling, please let us know! We’ll be glad to answer any questions you have, and letting us know which parts of our tutorial are unclear helps us work out which parts of it we need to improve.

Many thanks! :slight_smile:

Things are not happening as outlined in the tutorial. Before I can be more specific, could someone please tell me how I can change the current FMOD Studio colour scheme? Every window that opens is black writing on a dark grey background - so hard to read anything. I tried changing my Windows 10 global colour settings, but FMOD in unaffected.

EDIT: Looks like I can’t alter this - and that a change is very long overdue (quoting from this forum):

At the time of writing (July of 2019), FMOD Studio does not include any light mode, high contrast mode, or similar display mode designed to make it easier to see. This feature is already on our feature/improvement tracker, but has not yet been scheduled for development.

Unfortunately, that is indeed the case: As of the time of writing (February of 2025), FMOD Studio does not support any light mode, high contrast mode, or similar display mode designed to make its interface easier to see.

I’ll add you to the list of people who have requested this feature.

Thanks Joseph :wink:

Six years on from the previous message, as I copied into mine, I won’t hold my breath. Not sure how the current colour scheme was ever thought to be a good idea, but hey ho… Maybe if I adjust my desktop colour settings I can improve things somewhat. I must admit though, it has put me off using FMOD studio, as I really have to struggle to read what is written (my eyes partly to blame, to be sure) and end up feeling a bit irritated by it. J

Best wishes

Martin

Thanks for the feedback.

I’ll pass that tip on to future users who have difficulty reading our UI.

Hopefully I won’t need to, of course - but as you say, there’s no telling how long it’ll be before the feature is implemented.

Hi Joseph. FYI, yes, increasing my nVidia CP brightness slider to 100% makes things quite a bit easier. …

Looks like the terminology in the programme has changed since the tutorial was made - '“multi-instrument” now called “multi-sound” (I assume) for example, but it’s perfectly followable. But for a complete beginner at this, there isn’t really enough detail there to be sure that one is doing things correctly. For instance, the wav sounds I have and from which I am looking to create an FMOD are typical of aircraft in X-Plane: an overall ‘sound’ folder and subfolders with ‘alert’, ‘engine’, ‘systems’, ‘weather’ and so on. If I have understood correctly, all the sounds I wish to end up hearing must be within the FMOD - nothing that is in the ‘sound’ folder will play once there is a working FMOD folder (in the plugins folder for X-Plane: not sure if you are familiar with the programme or not).

I started with the wav files in the ‘engine’ subfolder - ten of them. In the tutorial example there are three. When I add all these to a new event, add Audio Track, then 'multi-sound- - and then drag the multi-selection of audio assets from the assets browser onto the instrument’s playlist (all as per the tutorial), I get more than one (overlapping) ‘multi-sound’ box. (Two of the wav files in the Assets box now are marked ‘streaming’, the others lose their unassigned label, if memory serves me correctly for the term used). Now I am stuck. Do I drag all three boxes to the start of the timeline, or try to get them consecutive along it (in which case, does the order matter?).

Then, what about all the wav files that are present in the other subfolders, or to add ‘clicks’ to switches etc? Are they all dragged to the same event/timeline? Can’t see yet how FMOD instructs the simulator (here) to play all these appropriately - the right sounds at the right time.

I was warned that this was going to be a steep learning curve, but it looks very interesting too, so I am keen to learn, if I can, to the point of being able one day to create FMODs as and when I liked (even though, as a pensioner now, I may not learn as fast as I once did!). Thing is, I don’t expect to be ‘spoon-fed’ by posting here - you folks have your own stuff to do, FMOD or otherwise! Open to any suggestions as to how I can proceed. Maybe I need to read every page of the online User Manual - but that’s a LOT for a beginner!! Trial and error perhaps, keep doing it wrong until I stumble on how to get it right: but I doubt that would lead to satisfactory results.

Many thanks! :slight_smile:

It’s actually the other way around; we renamed “multi sounds” to “multi instruments” some time ago. (We decided that calling them “sounds” wasn’t descriptive enough, as literally everything in FMOD Studio is a tool for making sounds.)

That’s correct. FMOD Studio is a tool for making bank files - and the bank files are the only thing the game needs. Think of it like using a factory to make engines for aeroplanes: The finished engines go into the planes, and the factory that created them stays behind on the ground.

Hmm, that shouldn’t be happening. It sounds like you might be dragging the files onto the mutli instrument’s trigger region in the editor pane rather than dragging them onto the playlist in the deck.

To put it another way, don’t drag them here:


Drag them here, instead:

“Streaming” means that the assets have been automatically set to use the “streaming” loading mode. There are three different loading modes available in FMOD Studio; some of them save more memory or result in slightly shorter loading times, but they all allow a game to play sounds, so you don’t need to know the differences between them when you’re just starting out.

The “unused” label indicates that a sound file isn’t used in your FMOD Studio project. It’s there so that if you ever decide to clean up your project, you’ll know which sound files are safe to delete. Naturally, since you’ve added the files to an event, you’re using them in that event - so they’re not “unused” any more.

The exact details of how to do this for Xplane will be in the Xplane tutorials, but here’s a broad overview of the general idea.

Think of each FMOD Studio event as being like a cassette tape: If something sets it playing, it’ll make some sounds, and it’ll stop when it’s stopped. Each cassette tape has a name written on it, so that you can tell them apart. (Technically each event has two different names, a “path” and a “GUID,” but you get the idea.) When the game loads a bank, it can see all the tapes stored in that bank. It also knows that it’s supposed to play tapes with specific names in specific circumstances - so for example, when the player of the game flips a switch in their plane’s cockpit, the game knows it’s supposed to play a tape labelled “flip tiny red switch” (or what-have-you), so it’ll look for a tape with that label in the bank, and (assuming it’s there) will play it.

The Xplane tutorials will explain exactly what you have to do to make events that Xplane can identify and play.

This forum exists to answer questions about FMOD, so don’t hold back! It actually helps us out, since it lets us know which parts of our documentation aren’t as clear as they could be - and of course, it might help out our other users who encounter similar problems and read this thread later.

Dear Joseph,

Thank you SO much for your very kind reply! I will have another go at my little project over the weekend – and OK, I will post again on the forum if and when (will most probably be ‘when’!) I have more queries.

(Sounds like, re. ‘multi-sound’, I don’t have the latest version of FMOD Studio. I’ll double-check).

All the best,

Martin

That could well be the case. I imagine you’ll want to use the version of FMOD Studio that’s compatible with the version of X-Plane that you’re developing content for: X-Plane 11 is compatible with FMOD Studio version 1.08.xx, and X-Plane 12 is compatible with FMOD Studio version 2.02.xx. (The difference is because the two X-Plane games were developed some years apart; in both cases, the developers chose to integrate the latest version of the FMOD Engine that was available at that time.)

Ah yes, you are right Joseph. The version I downloaded (I had forgotten this!!) is not the latest available, but the latest that works with X-Plane, as you point out. J