hi!
Most DAWs include a feature that allows you to render a track with all of it’s effects into flat audio, it is very useful if the track has a lot of expensive effects or you want to manipulate the resulting sound directly.
I was wondering if FMOD Studio includes something like this? I searched around the docs and the web and couldn’t really find any discussion about such feature, so if there’s info about it could you please point me to it?
It does not. FMOD Studio is not a tool for creating flat audio. It is a tool for creating dynamic and interactive audio.
At first glance, those two things might sound similar - it’s all just audio, right? - but it means there are huge practical differences in how we handle audio under-the-hood. All of our effects and our mixer need to be processed in real time, for example.
By contrast, DAWs are specialised in bouncing out flat audio - and every part of their design and behavior is geared towards it. They can afford to have sounds that take longer to process than they take to play, and to support highly complex layered mixes that would be prohibitively expensive to make interactive - and the quality of the flat audio tracks they can produce is much, much better for it.
So, while we could theoretically add a feature for bouncing out flat audio tracks, doing so would not product results as good as using a DAW, since DAWs are purpose designed for that specific task.
Many thanks for the comprehensive response!
This totally makes sense and honestly I much prefer it when software has a thought out design philosophy and adheres to it, unlike other applications which try to do everything and end up doing nothing well.