The new velocity seek speed in FMOD Studio 2.03 is fantastic – thanks for that!
I have a question that’s been brought up a few times over the years (since at least 2014): why is the timeline speed fixed? If we could adjust it, it would make it so much easier to avoid the issues that come with time-stretching and pitch correction. It could even open up creative ways to use FMOD more like a step sequencer for building beats, or as a kind of in-game DAW with lots of musical potential.
I’m sure there’s a good reason for keeping it fixed… but it would be amazing if this were possible!
The timeline’s speed isn’t fixed. It’s tied to the event’s pitch macro property, so if you adjust the event’s pitch upward, the timeline playback position moves faster; and if you turn the pitch down, the timeline playback position moves slower.
Though, I guess you’re really asking “why is the timeline speed fixed to the event pitch.” There is a reason for that: While FMOD Studio presents the timeline as just another parameter, under-the-hood it’s also the rate at which FMOD processes samples from assets. Keeping timeline speed synchronized to asset processing rate ensures (for example) that if you have a bunch of a synchronous instruments laid out along the timeline such that each instrument starts just as the previous instrument ends, adjusting the event’s pitch up does not introduce gaps of silence between instruments, and adjusting it down doesn’t cause the later-triggered instruments to overlap with the earlier ones.
It’s true that the way things currently work is inflexible, and that FMOD Studio doesn’t support time-variant pitch-invariant step sequencing. A thing we could do to support this is make parameter velocity automateable… I’ll add that suggestion to our feature and improvement tracker.
Thank you for your answer! Yes, exactly — “why is the timeline speed fixed to the event pitch?” That makes sense, but coming from a DAW background, I expected some things to behave more like a traditional music sequencer. That said, FMOD is impressively flexible, and the kinds of music events you can build — including generative ones — are quite powerful.
Thanks also for adding the suggestion of a velocity parameter that can be automated.
Here are some other things I tried as a work around for my drum groove event (three audio tracks with short samples for hi-hat, snare, and bass drum, aligned on the timeline):
Timeline with multiple tempo markers, copy-pasting the same drum sequence, and adding magnetic regions to jump via a parameter. This actually works well, but it’s not a practical solution — it’s error-prone and doesn’t allow for smooth tempo changes (not to mention the tedious setup).
Command instruments triggering one-shot samples in action sheets (with high priority, no streaming assets, max instances set to 1, voice stealing disabled, and quantisation enabled). There’s no pitch shift here, but unfortunately, it isn’t rhythmically tight and falls apart when the timeline speed is modified. I had hoped this would work out of the box — especially since nested events stay perfectly in sync (understandably, since their audio plays back to the same master in the parent event). Any chance this could be made to work with additional optimisation settings?
Haven’t tried yet: Programmer instruments (I assume same result) and MIDI with DLS files, but FMOD Studio doesn’t support MIDI on audio tracks anyway.
Another route might be starting multiple events simultaneously with sample-accurate timing — which fmod studio supports cf. your 2023 post — but as you noted, that’s not possible in Unity (or is it now maybe?), and I’m using Unity for this project. That approach would open up an entirely new world of advanced sequencing.