Allow Sound to Fade Out when Scatterer Spawn Steals Voice

FMOD Studio
1

I’ve got 3 events: A, B, C.

A & B each have play one looping sound (Each has one track, one Single Instrument, and one Loop Region matching the Instrument region). The master track has AHDSR on the volume so when I stop the event it fades out.

I want to trigger these events every couple of seconds or so, alternating between A & B, fading out the previous event, and localizing the new event from a random position in my 7.1 system.

So, I created a Scatterer Instrument in Event C, referenced A & B in the playlist, turned off Randomize Playlist, set Polyphony to 1, set Spawn Stealing to Oldest, & Spawn Interval between 5-10 seconds.

The spawning is working great, but when the new voice takes over the old voice, the referenced sound event just cuts; the reference event’s Release on the AHDSR automation doesn’t playout.

How can I fade out the oldest voice in Scatter instead of cutting when spawn stealing?

2

There’s a way to get the behavior you want, but not by using a scatterer instrument. (The main purpose of the polyphony setting of a scatterer instrument is to strictly limit the number of voices that instrument uses, and an event that’s still fading out is an event that’s still consuming voices.)

  1. Remove the scatterer instrument in event C, and replace it with two event instruments, one of which references A, and the other, B. Stretch these instruments out so that they’re both ten seconds long, and lay them out along the timeline such that they don’t overlap.
  2. Put a destination marker at the start of each instrument, and a series of transition markers along each instrument that jump to the other instrument’s destination marker, starting at the five second mark and ending at the ten second mark.
  3. Adjust the probability conditions of each transition marker such that they increase in probability from left to right along each instrument, with the rightmost marker always having a 100% trigger probability. Assuming n your markers are evenly spaced, the probability of each transition marker should be 1/n, where n is the number of markers to the right of that marker on the same instrument, plus one.

This will result in the cursor transitioning from one instrument to the other every 5-10 seconds, allowing the previous instrument to fade out each time.

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