Manually extending the audio

[DekuAdo]

I wanted to know how I can import an audio track and have it fully shown? Whenever I drag and drop any audio into a fresh project it always has the audio in the first frame, forcing me to extend the audio manually. Which is fine for a very short clip but horrifying when I want to make something longer than like 30 secs or even 1 min.

Please help me out here. I really wanna start animation but this just doesn't work for me

[ClayUUID]

You know if you have multiple frames selected and hit F5, it will insert that many frames instead of just a single frame. So it's easy to add a large number of frames quickly.

Or, you can just scroll out into no-frame land, select a frame, then hit F5 once to add frames all the way out to that point.

[DekuAdo]

So there's no way to have the audio be extended to it's full length automatically?

[Mario_CR]

Yep that's how it is for no discernible reason. This is one small quality of life improvement Adobe needs to add to the program.

[DekuAdo]

wait.... this is a common problem? But why haven't I seen anyone with same issue as me 

[Mario_CR]

Well because technically is not an issue, it just requires you to expand the frames manually, it's more like an annoyance.

[ClayUUID]

The reason is very easily discernable: Because having the timeline automatically balloon out every time you dropped in an audio file would not be desirable behavior, especially since Animate supports audio playing independently of the timeline.

It probably wouldn't be very difficult to write a script to extend a timeline to the length of its audio file.

[Mario_CR]

I would say it is expected behavior for an animation app. It should be the default for actionscript3 documents at least. Doesn't make sense to cater the usability to the 3 or 4 developers still coding with AS3 while inconveniencing your main base. A checkbox in the preferences would do the trick.

[ClayUUID]

Right, an animation app, not an audio app. Changes to the timeline configuration are completely under the control of the author. There are no functions that change the timeline as a second-order effect.

How would such a feature even work? If you dropped a new audio file in the middle of an existing animation, would it push out just its own layer, or every layer? Or overwrite what's already in its layer? If you change the sync type from Stream to Event, should it unextend the timeline? If you change it to a shorter clip, should it shrink the timeline? Have you considered any of these use cases? Features like this that try to "helpfully" guess at the right thing to do are almost universally worse than features that just do what they're told.

And in all my years reading Flash/Animate forums, I've never once seen anyone complain about this, so apparently it's not as big of a problem as you think.

[DekuAdo]

Well thanks for the advice.
I was just wondering since I saw an animation YTer showing his process and when he imported an audio file into the timeline it instantly expanded making it easier to use and since I couldn't find anything online I thought my system or program was bugged.
Guess that's just a feature then.

[Mario_CR]

The reason I mentioned animation apps is because every single one does this already when importing audio, but don't take it from me, go to YouTube and search how to import audio in: Moho, Clip Studio Paint, Toonboom, Opentoonz, TV Paint, Krita, Blender 3D, you name it. The only app that requires you to extend the frames at import is Animate so clearly this is neither standard nor desirable.

Regarding possible issues I'm sure the team can figure it out. It's just an option to extend the frame span to the length of the audio at import, that's it. Such a menial step, no need to rework the entire timeline for that. What's the current behavior? Audio layer is overwritten at playhead position when another falls on top, layers don't get shuffled around when new audio clips are inserted (which is also true for the competition) Stream/Event settings have no effect on frame length, a shorter clip has no effect on frame length. Keep it that way, I don't see how these are an obstacle.