Working with System Audio
The audio capabilities of Anime Studio are highly dependent on the system that the software is loaded on. Below are some tips for working with audio on each of the different systems.
Using Audio in Windows
For Windows-based systems, you can select and use the WAV format. This format stores uncompressed audio and is generally audio CD quality, although WAV files can be downgraded to use a lower bit rate and sampling. WAV files work great and are generally good quality, but their downside is that they are huge.
For compressed audio, the MP3 format is the format of choice. It is popular, and most sound editing software can easily convert various sound files to the MP3 format. Anime Studio also supports loading or playing back MP3 files. You can also use them when exporting your animation to the Flash or QuickTime formats. To learn more on using MP3 files, see Chapter 34, “Exporting to the Web.”
New Feature
The ability to load and use MP3 audio files is new to Anime Studio 6.
Caution
If exporting the project to the Flash (SWF) format, make sure you only use a single MP3 audio file. Anime Studio cannot encode multiple MP3 files when exporting to Flash.
Using Audio in Macintosh
Mac-based systems use the AIFF audio format. This format is the default audio format for Macs, and these files can be loaded and used within Anime Studio without any trouble.
Caution
Sometimes audio files have trouble when loaded into Anime Studio. If you are trying to use a sound file that has an odd sampling rate, then the sound file will not work. To fix problem sound files, load and export the sound files using a standard sampling rate.
Using Audio in Linux
If you’re running Anime Studio on Linux, you’ll need to do some additional configuration to make the audio work correctly. If you’ve added an audio file to the animation that isn’t being played back when you run the animation, try entering the following in the terminal window:
> ls /dev/dsp*
This lists the devices available on your system. From this list of devices, make sure that an audio device is available. If an audio device is available and other applications can play audio, then another process probably has exclusive access to the audio device. To free the audio device, enter the following into the terminal window:
> fuser /dev/dsp
This command returns the number of the process that has control over the audio device. Once you’ve determined that another application has control over the audio device, you can try to manually disable the application that has control, but if this doesn’t work, you can issue the following command to the end of the process:
> kill -9 fuser /dev/dsp
Tip
If the audio only works when the controlling process is killed, you can add this command to a startup script that is executed automatically when Anime Studio is started.