UE Audio Component vs. FMOD Audio Component - Envelope Followers

[DrewKski0]

Hi-yeee Friendly Neighborhood FMODders!

My team & I are working out how to set up an envelope follower for a walkie talkie. Specifically, we’re looking to get the walkie to light up relative to the intensity of the audio waveform playing from each walkie-specific dialogue event. One of our engineers figured out a way to do this with the native UE Audio Component but we’re hitting a wall getting the same behavior out of FMOD events.

Chat GPT (and I am sincerely sorry for even bringing it up) suggested metering the bus from the mixer group, but we’re having trouble doing this (or even knowing if this is the right way forward).

We’re using UE 5.6.1 and FMOD 2.03.08. Any suggestions?

(and thank you!)

[jeff_fmod]

Yes querying the bus metering info is a good approach. The process would be:

• Find the bus with Studio::System::getBus
• Get the bus’s underlying Core API ChannelGroup with Studio::Bus::getChannelGroup
  • If you can’t access it, it’s probably because it hasn’t been created yet, in which case you need to force it into existence with Studio::Bus::lockChannelGroup
• Get the ChannelGroup’s DSP_HEAD with ChannelControl::getDSP
• Enable metering on the DSP with DSP::setMeteringEnabled

Now whenever you want to get the peak or rms levels you can use DSP::getMeteringInfo on that DSP object.
Hopefully that helps!
EDIT: I noticed someone else happens to be using this same approach for getting metering info, in case you need a code snippet to reference Clarification on how getMeteringInfo works