For those of you into game audio, I am finding FMOD to be a very powerful program for making your game music/sound effects creatively adaptive and interactive.
I have always wondered how game composers made their music so well integrated into the thier games without having any computer programing skills. Sure, the programmers do a lot of audio programming, but there are just somethings only an audio dude can do. As awesome and important programmers are (my brother is one in fact), I never felt completely comfortable giving them 50% control of my music.
The FMOD Designer software was the answer for me -- why? Because it is designed for audio geeks that couldn't code their way out of an 8bit sack! All that seemingly impossible, high-level stuff I can now do, such as:
1.) Create music that changes seamlessly depending on the state of the game (exmaple: you are fighting a bad guy, then 10 more bad guys show up so you want the music to get more intense)
2.) Variation and/or randomizxation of music/sound to create a unique audio experience every time the player turns on the game.
3.) Create real-time atmospheric audio events via randomization effects.
4.) Incorporate real-time audio effects (example: reverb for when the player goes into a cave. The music and sound with have an "echo" effect to it until the player is out of the cave)
5.) Save on system resources using banks, randomization of your sound files (so you don't have to make a bunch of different sound files, FMOD does it for you), and real-time effects.
I am still trying to wrap my head around this program, but it is actually pretty easy to use. I hope to create some adaptive music demos soon. I also plan using it in a few upcoming game projects I have in the near future. If you are into game audio, here is a great YouTube tut to get you started (aside from just reading the documentation of course):
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