FMOD Studio API now available for HTML5

[Brett Paterson]

FMOD Studio is a cross platform API with a low level component (loads all sound formats, plays them via channels, allows DSP effects, geometry, 3d sound etc) and the FMOD Studio tool API which interfaces with FMOD Studio audio creation tool.  More information here www.fmod.com

http://www.fmod.org/documentation/#content/generated/platform_js/basics.html has information about the implementation

there are some audio demos at http://www.fmod.org/public/js and http://www.fmod.org/public/js_studio

Any questions let me know.

 

[rich]

Very nice to see! Have always loved FMOD. A few questions:

1) Under what license is this released? (what cost to include it in our games)

2) The payload size is pretty huge - 2.1MB for fmod.js itself and another 467KB for the fmod.js.mem file - I guess this is probably a side effect of emscripten, but any plans to bring it down at all?

3) I remember a long time ago FMOD used to be able to play protracker / fasttracker files - this included or did you stop doing that ages ago?

[Brett Paterson]

1) FMOD has a new license structure now.  It is very simple.   If your game budget is under $500,000 USD , FMOD is free.   If it is over $500k and below $1.5m, the license fee is $5000, if the budget is $1.5m+ then the fee is $15k.  All projects need to register with us still.

2) This is the initial release, which I would consider 'beta', The next phase was going to be size and cpu improvements.  I have experimented with the SIMD JS extensions but they made stuff slower! I'm still looking into that.  If you have a target size that you would prefer FMOD to be, I'll look at aiming for it.   Besides more code tweaking, There's the option of having different versions with different features to reduce the size.   FMOD supports like 20 file formats, so things like ogg and flac are eating up a lot of code space.  I remember in the MiniFMOD days there was a tool that took the features you wanted in a .h file, and generated the lib based on features only you wanted.  It would be great if something like that was possible.

3) Its still there!  Go to http://www.fmod.org/public/js/load_from_memory.html and load a mod/s3m/xm/it/mid file and it will play!

[rich]

1) Does the free license need to include a logo or similar? That's a good offer though.

2) Yeah size is everything for web games really, a MiniFMOD approach would make a lot of sense. I think perhaps if it just covered the 'core' 3 audio formats that would be plenty (which I'd consider to be mp3, m4a and ogg). As much as I love protracker and flac I'd say they are utterly wasted for 99.9% of devs

3) Woohoo! I remember when we integrated FMOD in DarkBasic all those years ago (back in the 90s!), and everyone loved the audio support it had, playing mods, etc. Hell we even used to support midi music. Talk about a blast from the past.

[rich]

Sorry, forgot to add - is there an example of using your API to create a real-time vu-meter effect or similar?

[Brett Paterson]

1) EULA is here http://www.fmod.org/eula/  there is a credit requirement

2) .ogg is a pretty terrible format for size, so we'd prefer .FSB with our own vorbis implementation, as the only format (you use fsbankex.exe to pack any format into .fsb).  You can target vorbis/fadpcm/pcm, and it avoids a bunch of loose files.  It uses a modified Tremor codec internally and its way smaller.   There are also 20 or so DSP effects.   They're smaller and dont have as much size impact, but thats harder to pick which ones should stay.

edit: I've just tested FSB only, with geometry, the convolution reverb DSP and the pitch shift DSP removed, and it goes from to 2.1mb and 467 for the mem file to 1.5mb and 224kb for the mem file.

[Brett Paterson]

33 minutes ago, rich said:

Sorry, forgot to add - is there an example of using your API to create a real-time vu-meter effect or similar?

I just posted this to our Q&A forum which is in C++ but it shows a little text mode meter bouncing up and down in response to the sound that is playing.

http://www.fmod.org/questions/question/visualizing-waveform-in-fmod-5/

[Brett Paterson]

There's a new FMOD Studio release 1.09.03 out now with some significant size reductions, about 640kb total from the lowlevel API 

[rich]

Nice work, that's a hell of a reduction! I assume that's the FSB only release with the complex DSP effects gone?

Are you going to put the library up somewhere for developers to consume easily? GitHub, npm, etc?

[Brett Paterson]

yes, that version is now linked to the studio api file too, but if someone wants to also load mods or oggs they can use the logging version which has everything.

the standalone _reduced version is FSB format only (encode normal files using fsbankex tool) , and has pitch shift and convolution reverb removed, but keeps the other effects (they're quite small and dont make much size difference).

Downloads are from our main website still, we do have a github page but it is for external content only at the moment.

[MrVR]

On 2/15/2017 at 2:38 AM, Brett Paterson said:

FMOD Studio is a cross platform API with a low level component (loads all sound formats, plays them via channels, allows DSP effects, geometry, 3d sound etc) and the FMOD Studio tool API which interfaces with FMOD Studio audio creation tool.  More information here www.fmod.com

http://www.fmod.org/documentation/#content/generated/platform_js/basics.html has information about the implementation

there are some audio demos at http://www.fmod.org/public/js and http://www.fmod.org/public/js_studio

Any questions let me know.

 

@MackeyK24 this is what IM talking about man