Porting a legacy game from XBox360 days to modern consoles, and we have .fsw and .fdp files (and all the content that goes with it), but we need it to run in a modern FMOD 64bit console environment.
My understanding is that there is no easy migration method to this; we have to basically rebuild the entire soundbank content (which is not going to be fun, there are 62 different sound banks in the existing project) - is that correct?
As you evidently know, FMOD Ex (A.K.A. FMOD 4) is a legacy product, and doesn’t support most modern platforms. As you say, you will need to migrate the project to a relatively-recent version of FMOD Studio and build new versions of the banks.
That being said, we have tried to make the process of migration as painless as possible. As described in our documentation on the topic, the first step is to open the FMOD Designer project’s workspace in FMOD Studio; FMOD Studio will then automatically migrate the content to FMOD Studio project format, preserving the content of the FMOD Designer project as much as possible.
There are only a few kinds of content that can’t be migrated; you’ll have to check whether your FMOD Designer project contains anything from this list. If it does, you’ll have to recreate the same behavior after migrating the project, using the tools available in FMOD Studio. If you have any trouble migrating your project or in identifying how to recreate behavior equivalent to FMOD Designer features in FMOD Studio, please don’t hesitate to ask for help.
I should mention that in FMOD Studio, it is events that are assigned to banks rather than individual assets; the sampledata of the assets associated with an event is automatically included in all the banks to which that event is assigned. Your migrated FMOD Studio project will therefore contain the same list of banks as your pre-migration FMOD Designer project, but will list the events assigned to each bank rather than listing the individual assets of those events. In most cases this makes very little difference, as it was common practice for all the assets associated with an FMOD Designer event to be assigned to the same bank in any case, but it might be relevant if your game ever split the assets of an event up across multiple banks.