FMOD is a wildly popular sound engine for games, used widely in games for PCs, consoles, and portables alike. FMOD is known for being on the bleeding edge as far as capabilities, but even given that, it’s a pleasant surprise that the engine has now made its way to the iPhone and iPod touch.
It’s got some impressive capabilities going for it, too:
- Mic input
- 3D audio
- DSP effects
- Compressed samples, MOD, and MIDI
And, in good news for indie studios, it’ll cost just US$500 per title to license.
Of course, you can add this to Pure Data (Pd), which found its way to the mobile platform via the (partially open-source) RjDj project. RjDj is a music platform, not a game platform, but Pd has some powerful audio processing capabilities of its own, and I’d count them both in the category of interactive music. The RjDj gang will be having their next “sprint” – a developer intensive to build interactive scenes for the platform – in Berlin, with New York to follow in January. (I’ll be at the New York event, naturally.)
December is the time for the next RjDj sprint: The Reality Jockeys would like to invite you to the Scene composing session on 12-14 December 2008 in Berlin at this nice location:
Here’s the RjDj event, via the Pd list:
moviepilot
Bluecherstrasse 22
10961 Berlin (Kreuzberg)
The action starts on Friday, 12.12. at 12 am and spans the whole weekend. We’ll post further details/timetable etc. briefly before the actual sprint happens.
What is a RjDj sprint?
RjDj sprints bring together musicians and artists interested in working on reactive, algorithmic music ("Scenes") for mobile devices and do other mad things with sound. Currently supported devices are the iPhone and in an yet unreleased version the iPod Touch.
The goal is to create, test and enjoy many new scenes for the RjDj application. We know that many musisicans don’t have iPhones, so we will provide some devices for development during the sprint. Prior sprints happened in Bizau, Barcelona and Vienna. Check out http://rjdj.me/sprints to see how much fun we generally spread!
Attending the sprint is free, but we kindly ask you to register on our website: http://rjdj.me or via info@rjdj.me
Please forward this invitation to anyone you think might be interested.
And here’s the news on FMOD. So, Firelight, I wonder – will other mobile platforms follow? (And mobile platform makers, this clearly demonstrates the need to have lower-level development capabilities, cough, Android.)
Firelight Technologies today released its popular FMOD Music and Sound Effects System for the iPhone platform. With this release, iPhone developers can now use the same high quality FMOD audio engine that is widely used throughout the games industry.
Brett Paterson, CEO says "We’re proud to bring FMOD to this exciting platform. FMOD is a natural fit for the iPhone with its support for sequenced music formats such as mod and midi, compressed samples and small code size. Users can keep it small, or scale right up to take full advantage of the microphone, 3D audio and suite of DSP effects that FMOD natively supports. Being conscious of the budget nature of iPhone development we are also releasing the API at a special iPhone price of $500 per title. This includes the use of FMOD Designer. By combining the power of the iPhone and FMOD we hope to see some really creative programs and hear some great sounding games."
FMOD Ex download / free evaluation