Sound Markers - Named waypoints in audio

As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to sync game actions with a certain point of music/sound.

I searched for a request like this in the forums and i gotta say i’m REALLY surprised that this hasn’t even been mentioned yet… If we can have certain keyframes or markers in Animations that we can call events on, why can’t it be the same on sounds? I’ve been thinking about creating a music system that dynamically changes the music stage to fit the gameplay purposes, but it sounds impossible to know at what time to transition so the beats are not off. I know, this is a really really specific and rare case, but there are more, imagine the possibilities this could give, being able to call certain game actions on specific parts of the music, it would greatly enhance our ability to work with music and sound since so many games lack connection with it. Maybe a new genre could be imported to roblox, games entirely synced to music!

I’m not sure how hard it would be to implement this, but i’m suggesting having some kind of Audio Viewer plugin (like the roblox animator) to view the waveforms and be able to set markers at specific points of the track, then get the markers events with script - Sound:GetMarkerReachedSignal(“MarkerName”)

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Two definite use cases for me are seamless transitioning of songs and combining sound effects into a single file to avoid having to upload a dozen separate audios (unsure of whether or not that’s a good idea, considering all the sound effects would have to be preloaded to play a single one).

Regarding implementation, MP3 and OGG formats already both support chapters. MP3 specs cost about $175 so I’m not about to look into the details of that, but OGG’s implementation is as simple as adding comments with specific titles and timestamps to the metadata: Chapter Extension - XiphWiki

Using metadata embedded in audio to dictate chapters would probably make it impossible to edit chapters after uploading, but the tradeoff of being able to use industry standard tools like Audacity and Adobe Audition to make precision adjustments is worth it in my opinion.

As for an in-Studio viewer, it sure would be nice if the API had enough functionality to let us make our own viewers… hint hint

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Would be really helpful to have if you’re making rhythm type game.

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