I’m completely new to this, but I really don’t want to have to split my single audio file into several different audio files and import them separately into FMOD. I have one audio file that has several different leaf crunches, and I want to randomly play one of them, but multi-instrument isn’t letting me set the starting point of the audio file, only the ending point. I want it to start playing here for the first clip.
There are a couple of different ways to do this. When using a synchronous instrument (like the one in your screenshot) clicking and dragging the left edge of the instrument to the right allows you to change the point from which the associated asset starts playing. This is called “left edge trimming.” If you use a single instrument rather than a multi instrument, you can even edit the audio file used by the instrument inside FMOD Studio, without having to re-export it from your DAW, by right-clicking on the instrument and selecting “Replace Audio with Trimmed Copy” from the context menu.
Alternatively, you could use set the instrument’s start offset property to determine how far through the associated asset it should start playing when triggered. Unlike left edge trimming this only affects the instrument when it’s triggered, and not subsequently, which makes it more useful for looping instruments and asynchronous instruments.
That being said, we do actually recommend you export multiple different versions of your asset from your DAW instead of one big file that contains multiple different variant sounds. Using one big file means that the FMOD Engine will have to load that entire file even if you only want to play part of it, increasing your game’s resource requirements by a small amount.
More importantly, multi instruments don’t allow you to set separate left edge trimming or start offset values for different playlist entries, so if you were planning to use a multi instrument to select which leaf crunch plays, you’ll need those leaf crunches to be in different asset files.