Audio Crash, drawing crash, yikes!

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Jamie K
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Audio Crash, drawing crash, yikes!

Post by Jamie K »

I fired up Moho 4.6 to animate a storyboard to a soundtrack. If I draw a shape Moho crashes. If I load a previously made animation and add the 2 minute .wav file and hit play Moho crashes. This is not usable.

Last time I animated with Moho I was using OSX 10.2, but now I have 10.3.7 on all machines.

Is Moho 4.6 not stable on OSX 10.3.7? Is there a Moho 4.x update I can get that is stable with OSX 10.3.7?

Is the new Moho 5.x stable and happy on OSX 10.3.7? Is animating with audio stable and working well on Moho 5.x on the Mac? If so, I'll be happy to upgrade if that's the best option. If not, or if there's no 4.x fix, I'll have to do this project with other software...

Thanks in advance for any answers.

Cheers,
-Jamie K
http://www.JamieKrutz.com

PS. I'm currently using: Moho 4.6, MacOSX 10.3.7, Quicktime 6.5.2 on a 2.5GHZ G5 w/2.5mb RAM.
Jamie K
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Joined: Wed Dec 29, 2004 2:19 am
Location: USA
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Post by Jamie K »

I downloaded Moho 5 demo, updated it to 5.6. Looks like a lot of improvements have been made. Way to go!

In this version I can now draw without crashing. I can also import audio without crashing. BTW it's cool that there is a visible waveform in the timeline.

However (and this is not a new problem for Moho) the audio playback is echoey. It sounds like it's playing back the sound twice: overlapped with one version delayed. I'm not sure that either version is accurate to the animation frames.

This is with an animation of only a single line with just a handful of points, and only three of them moving (as a test). I would think a dual 2.5GHZ PowerMac ought to be able to play audio in sync, even with more complex animation, with one hand tied behind its back.

I had turned on the "Allow Frame Skipping" option (otherwise the audio plays at the wrong speed, an even worse problem).

If I export a movie it plays fine. But it's going to be hard to animate to a soundtrack accurately when I can't tell for sure where my hits actually hit.

Is anyone else experiencing this problem? Is it on the list of things to fix for V5?

Thanks,
-Jamie K
http://www.JamieKrutz.com
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Lost Marble
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Post by Lost Marble »

I hear the audio "stuttering", but I've never heard it echo.

The audio playback generally works better with uncompressed audio files. MP3 files, for example, are harder to decode at different playback speeds. If you haven't done so, try an uncompressed WAV or AIFF file.
Jamie K
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Post by Jamie K »

Thanks for your reply and suggestions. Much appreciated. I really want to use Moho for this project.

Over the last few years I've never heard audio play in Moho without problems, over multiple versions of Moho and a variety of Macs. What I'm calling "echo" you're probably calling "stutter." Moho repeats bits of audio making it hard to determine where the audio actually occurs when you want to animate to it. The only way I've found to check audio sync accurately is to render an animation and check it there, but that would be tedious on this project.

I am testing with .wav files. Just now I tried using just one channel of a stereo file to see if that works any better. No joy.

Have you ever had a clean, accurate, unstuttering audio track? If so, how did you do it? Is there a trick to it? A certain sampling frequency Moho likes, or bit depth?

Are there other playback settings you would recommend? I've tried setting display quality to the lowest possible CPU load "wireframe" setting and it still stutters/echoes the audio. I've set "Allow Frame Skipping" and it still stutters/echoes. Without "Allow Frame Skipping" the audio plays at a slowed down speed even on my dual 2.5GHZ box.

Oddly, the stutter/echo happens even with NO animation created at all.

I'm using 16 bit ".wav." Audio playback while animating is not really what I'd call "working." Is this a priority for version 5? Is it really that hard to play back audio cleanly on a modern, fast computer? I can play the audio cleanly in another app while Moho previews, but of course it's not synched.

I'm using the demo version of Moho 5.6 to test with, on OSX 10.3.7.

Thanks,
-Jamie K
http://www.JamieKrutz.com
Jamie K
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Post by Jamie K »

A related question: Where do you set the frame rate?

IOW, if I want to animate at 24fps, where do I specify that, so the timeline aligns to the audio waveform accurately with 24 frame ticks per second of audio?

Thanks,
-Jamie K
http://www.JamieKrutz.com
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Lost Marble
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Post by Lost Marble »

Set the frame rate in the Project Settings dialog. Select the File->Project Settings menu command.
Jamie K
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Post by Jamie K »

Thanks for answering my last message. Can you also answer the questions in the message before that?

If I change the frame rate I get interesting results. For example with the frame rate at 24 frames/sec, the actual frame rate Moho achieves is just below that, around 18 frames/sec, so the sound stutters.

If I set a 12 frames/sec frame rate, the actual frame rate Moho achieves is even lower, 8-11 frames/sec (why would that be?). So the sound still stutters.

If I set the frame rate to 6 frames/sec, Moho suddenly can achieve a much higher frame rate faster than 24 frames/sec and the sound is smoother. Still not perfect sound for some reason, but much less stuttering/echoing.

BTW, all this is with no objects animating.

And all this time my Mac's processors are not being used to their max. There's extra CPU power available to make this work smoothly, why is it not being used?

Moho is really great in a lot of ways. But I think the audio code still needs work. Has anyone ever been able to play audio without stuttering? If so, what's the secret?

Is this only a problem on the OSX version of Moho?

Thanks in advance for any answers.

Cheers,
-Jamie K
http://www.JamieKrutz.com
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Lost Marble
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Post by Lost Marble »

I think the problem is worse on Mac than on Windows. As you've noticed, the playback framerate is not really where it should be - that's something we're working on. As that improves, the audio quality should as well.
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Lost Marble
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Post by Lost Marble »

I think we've got a fix for this. Unfortunately, we've had record snowfall this week that messed up everyone's lives. Hopefully things will clear up enough for an update on Monday.

Specifically, there is a timing problem on OS X. The two main problems this causes are:

1. The fps display when playing back an animation is wrong.
2. The audio-sync code doesn't actually know how fast the animation is playing, thus isn't able to properly sync up the audio.
Jamie K
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Post by Jamie K »

Enjoy the snow, stay warm and safe!

Great to hear you are zeroing in on a fix, I look forward to trying it.

Thanks,
-Jamie K
http://www.JamieKrutz.com
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