Skip/ Seek to specific time within sound

Hi there,
I recently started using FMOD and am running into a problem: I want to seek to a specific time in milliseconds within an event/ FMOD Audio Component, but can’t seem to find a way to do it (preferably with Blueprints). Specifically, I want to start the sound at that time.
The Set Timeline Position node for FMOD Audio Components sounds promising, but it seems to do nothing. A bit of googling has revealed to me that attempting to set a timeline position is apparently invalid behavior, but I can’t find any other information on the problem.

I actually don’t need to exactly hit a specific millisecond, so if there’s some workaround where you can somehow skip to a specific beat, that’s just as good!

Native Unreal Audio exposes a Start Time float, but it will be ignored if the sound asset is being streamed. Does FMOD have the same limitation where it’s just not possible?

You can seek within an audio file by using the Start Offset property of an FMOD Studio instrument. This property can be automated on a parameter, and thus can be controlled from within an Unreal Engine game in the same manner as any event parameter. Would that serve your needs?

Hmm, not quite.
In my specific case, I have a looping BGM that I want to start not from the beginning, but from millisecond x. I can get from millisecond to Start Offset by dividing by the timeline length, but if I start at 40%, then there will also be around 40% silence between the end of the sound and before the loop begins. Also, this approach doesn’t seem to work with multiple instruments, since the cursor still starts at the very beginning.
What I’m looking for is starting an event with the timeline cursor not at 0, but at a specified position.
After a bit of testing, I found out that Set Timeline Position actually works perfectly. It seems that I previously ran into a glitch/ hyper-aggressive optimization that completely disabled an FMODAudio Component if you don’t set its event in Begin Play… :thinking: Odd, but I hope it’ll eventually be documented in the Blueprint Reference.

I’m glad to hear you were able to get the behaviour you wanted. Thanks for letting us know!