1. Welcome to FMOD Studio

Whether you're a game sound designer, a composer, or a game audio professional in the making: Welcome to FMOD Studio, an intuitive and flexible solution for adaptive audio. With FMOD Studio, you can easily:

Design sound for your game using an intuitive DAW-like interface, with no programming knowledge necessary.
Design adaptive audio that dynamically reacts to everything that happens in your game.
Design sound for any game engine, and for any major platform.
Mix and balance your game live, as it runs.
Profile and record your game's audio output, then make changes and audition them without having to re-record.

You can navigate to more information on any of these topics by using the table of contents on the right side of this page.

If you're new to FMOD Studio, you should start with the FMOD Studio Concepts chapter, which introduces the core ideas and tools that you'll need to begin making audio content for your game. If you'd prefer to learn by doing, our Quick Start Tutorial explains the entire workflow of making content in FMOD Studio, starting with creating a new project and ending with built banks ready to be used in your game.

If you've been using FMOD Studio for a while and want to learn about the more advanced things you can do with it, the chapters listed in the table of contents provide in-depth explanations of things you can do.

Finally, if you're already an experienced user of FMOD Studio but need detailed information about a specific topic, the best place to start is the Glossary. There, you'll find definitions of many common FMOD Studio terms, along with references to related terms and documentation.

For all other information, including licensing and support, please head to www.fmod.com.

For information on using any FMOD example code from this documentation in your own programs, please visit https://www.fmod.com/legal.

We hope you enjoy discovering what FMOD Studio can do, and can't wait to hear what you create with it.

1.1 Minimum Specifications

FMOD Studio supports systems of the following minimum specifications:

Windows - Requires Windows 7 Service Pack 1 or higher.
macOS - Requires macOS 10.13 or higher.
Linux - Minimum GNU C library GLIBC_2.17 and ALSA or PulseAudio. Recommend Ubuntu based distribution of 18.04 or higher.

1.2 Release Information

FMOD Version numbers are split into three parts, in the format: productVersion.majorVersion.minorVersion. For example, the version 1.23.45 would indicate product version 1, major version 23, and minor version 45. Major versions contain significant changes, add new features, and may affect bank compatibility. Minor versions, also known as patch versions, contain bug fixes and smaller workflow improvements. The first few minor versions within each major version are "early access" versions.

For more information about version numbers and advice on picking which version to use, see the FMOD Versions section of the FMOD Studio Concepts chapter.