Random Music Playlist with 8 bar intro/outro overlap

FMOD Studio
1

Hi, I’m trying to do something that I thought would be fairly straight forward but I can’t figure out how to do it. I have a bunch of music tracks with the exact same bpm all with 8 bar intros and 8 bar outros and I want to play them in random order and when the 8 bar outro of one track starts trigger the 8 bar intro of the next track and have them overlap. I want to be able to shuffle them like you do with Multi-instruments so that it plays through all the tracks in the playlist in a random order before repeating any tracks in the playlist. Is this possible?

2

Ok from looking into it I think the only way we can do it is if we have some logic in the game code counting through the number of tracks randomly but excluding all the ones previously counted until it loops (for example if there was four tracks it would be like 2 3 1 4 then loop back to 2 and start again randomly selecting numbers from there) and I can set up parameter conditions in FMOD so that the numbers correspond with the transitions to each track

3

A scatterer instrument uses the same shuffle playlist selection mode as a multi instrument, and can overlap the sounds it plays; iff all your tracks are the same length, you could potentially use a scatterer instrument for this. You’d need to set the scatterer instrument’s min and max scatter distance to 0 to disable spatialization, of course.

The biggest limit of this method is that you’ll need to set the min and max spawn interval of the scatterer instrument to exactly the length of your tracks minus eight bars - which will only be possible if all of your tracks are the same length, and if their length (minus eight bars) is no greater than 300 seconds.

If that limitation doesn’t suit your requirements, your best option is probably to build this behavior partly in your game’s code, as you suggest.

4

Thanks for the response! Good to know I wasn’t missing anything incredibly obvious at least :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes: Yeah I think it would be nicer to have the more flexible option of building it partly in code.

5

I’ve added you to the list of people who’ve requested this feature.