Audio quality deteriorates on social media

[elvinius25]

Fellow animators,

I've been using Animate 2021 for about a month now and have stumbled upon a little problem:

My audio quality (including background music/noise, speech, voices, etc) becomes quite bad after uploading to YouTube or other social media platforms.

Before updating the program to Animate 2021, I had Animate CC 2018. Everytime I finished a new animation in Animate CC 2018, I would go to 'Publish Settings' and then to 'Audio Stream'. I would then change the compression from MP3 to ADPCM, because this allowed me to have perfect audio quality when posting to social media channels.

However, with Adobe's new 2021 update, I just cannot find the Audio Stream and compression options anymore when clicking on 'Publish Settings', in fact the whole panel looks different than the 2018 version. That is why I assumed that the audio type would fit the social media channels automatically, through Media Encoder or such. Unfortunately, this is not the case.

Please could anyone help me with this issue and tell me which compression to use/how to have good quality when publishing my animations?

Thanks a lot in advance!

P.S. in the 2018 version, I could simply test my animation in Animate itself and audio was included, however, in the latest version, I can only test in my browser and audio cannot be heard. If you don't mind, could you please give me a solution for this as well?

Cheers!

[Colin Holgate · Accepted solution]

The settings are in the same place as before, under the Flash (.swf) settings. Also, you should use the Raw, 44 KHz. The ADPCM is its own form of data compression, and Raw is truly uncompressed.

I realized after posting that you may be using an HTML5 Canvas FLA. If you are animating for video, you should use the Full HD preset template, which is an ActionScript 3.0 FLA. It has better quality and extra features over the HTML5 Canvas one.

Also, with it being ActionScript you can put this into the Actions panel on the first frame of the timeline:

stage.quality = "16x16";

That will give you 16x level of antialiasing, which should look very nice.

[elvinius25]

Yes, it's working now!

Thank you very much for your reply 🙂

Regards

[Colin Holgate · Accepted solution]

The part about not getting sound, and being able to test inside Animate, will also be solved when you change to using an ActionScript 3.0 FLA instead of HTML5 Canvas.