I am brand new to FMOD… I have terabytes of samples in a Pro Studio Environment. I have 2 TB connected to a fast NVMe on my Macbook Pro that I run my studio on and then a bunch more on network… I am trying to figure out the best way to ‘audition’ the sounds in the “Assets” tab. I wanted access to my thousands of sounds libraries, so I connected the preferences to a network drive…
is this not an intented use? is the assets suppose to be the final sounds in your project and I am suppose to bring these into a directory (locally)? I am confused… the network drive with the assets does take some time to fully populate in my folders but it did work a bit… I just don’t want to lose work or sounds or any issues down the road… so want to make sure I am doing things that are ok and not bad… Is there any technical issues with this setup? should I instead use another program to audition sounds? like Ableton / reaper / windows? etc… and then hand drag them into a secondary assets folder for just my project? I can do either or… would the network drive have issues if i constantly updated that drive with new sounds? would that mess up meta data? linking? project dependencies etc.? I’ve heard of FMOD projects losing file references and other things so I wanted to make sure I cover any bases early on.
I think what i wrote above is incorrect. i stopped using /assets/ as my network drive and instead I have a /assets/ locally in the project folder. (default). and I am just auditioning my sounds with Reaper’s Viewer and dragging them into the project which copies them to the projects /assets/ directory.
This is an intended use. It’s fairly common for people to keep their assets on an external network drive as you were doing. As you note, this makes it possible to access a wide variety of assets without having to copy all of them into your project.
That being said, there are some potential disadvantages of using a network drive as an external asset source directory that you should be aware of:
Some network drives may take longer to access than local drives or intermittently lose connection, and so may cause sluggish performance or inconsistent behavior when using assets from that drive in FMOD Studio.
There is a bug in older versions of FMOD Studio that causes it to run sluggishly when a project contains an extremely large number of assets.
If your FMOD Studio project depends on its assets being in a specific location relative to the project, the project is more liable to break when moved from one location or device from another.
No, not at all. You can include a variety of work-in-progress and unused audio files in your project’s assets directory if you want. There’s even an “Open in External Sample Editor” context menu item so that you can easily open assets that need editing in your audio editing software of choice.
When you build your project, only the assets that are actually used in your project’s events or audio tables are included in those banks. All files in your assets directory that are not used in your project are ignored by the bank building process.
No, other than the potential issues I’ve mentioned above.
No.
Modified asset files will be marked as “Modified” in FMOD Studio’s assets browser. New asset files will appear in FMOD Studio’s assets browser, but will be marked as “New!” until you use them in your project or manually import them.
No. Editing the content of an asset file, or adding a new asset file to the assets directory, does not mess up your FMOD Studio project’s metadata.
I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean by “linking.” Can you clarify what you mean?
No.
Changes to the content of an audio file do not affect FMOD Studio’s ability to reference that file.
FMOD generally only loses its ability to reference an asset if that asset file is been moved or renamed outside of FMOD Studio.
Thank you for the thorough reply. It’s nice to see that you can use them the way I was originally intending. I think my original issue of losing a sound was version control related, but now knowing that I can use assets for… assets… is nice, thanks!