Multi-Instrument Play Percentage Less Than 1%?

FMOD Studio
#1

I was hoping to add in some rare tracks to multi-instruments that have an extremely small chance of playing (i.e. less than a 1% chance) and in setting the play percentage to any decimal number, even at a single decimal place, it would round to the nearest whole. I did a bunch of research, read through documentation and the forums for an answer, but couldn’t find anything. Is there any way to do this beyond nesting several multi-instruments, or some other work-around that easier than that sort of thing?

Any help would be much appreciated!

#2

This should be confirmed by a staff member, but I guess it displays a round integer but internally uses the float number you entered. The hint is how other percentages are recalculated. I noticed something similar when trying to set very low LFO speed (but it worked, though).
However, I don’t know what’s the lowest possible decimal.

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#3

Yeah those are the things, it’s mainly just to figure out the limits if it doesn’t just set the value to a whole number. That’s neat that it worked for the LFO speed, that’s hopefully a good sign. Would be nice to have the actual value displayed if that’s the case though, so hopefully a member sees this.
Appreciate the response here! Glad it’s not just me.

#4

I’ve made a funny little test to found this out. Make a looping multi-instrument containing:

  • an audible test sound
  • an empty instrument (single instrument is fine) - it will only take the virtual computation time to play it

Set the play percentage of the test sound to 1% and check the frequency of play (it comes every 3 seconds or so, on my system). Now change to 0.1%. I can confidently say the sound is around 10 times less frequent!

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#5

As Alcibiade says, FMOD Studio already supports setting play percentages to decimal values, and uses those values in practice; it’s just that we don’t display those values in the playlist, and automatically round them to the nearest whole number if you subsequently try to edit them.

This definitely seems like something we should improve, so I’ve added it to our feature/improvement tracker.

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#6

Awesome, great to have that confirmed. Thank you!

#7

Thanks for testing that out, glad to hear that worked well. Really appreciate your input here!

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