FMOD on non-playing audio

Question

1. Hey, is there any way to get the audio spectrum of a section of a song using FMOD if it is not playing?
2. Can I render a full song waveform using FMOD (+opengl/openframeworks/etc.) before the song is playing?

Answer 1

1. Yes.
2. Yes but you will have to do the your own spectrum analysis on the time domain wavedata.

You can get the wave data from the FMOD::Sound using Sound::lock. To do this you would have to create the sound as FMOD_SAMPLE which means the entire song will be decompressed into memory. You can render the waveform using this data and also conduct your spectrum analysis. FMOD's inbuilt 'getSpectrum' function will only work with snapshots of the playing data in a Channel or ChannelGroup.