The audio system is completely broken

[Interinactive]

It has been for years. Will this ever be addressed?

You can either export as an MP3 where long scenes will eventually go out of sync with the audio, or you can use RAW/Speech/ADPCM where audio will crackle at random points.

I am on the 5th year of what might be the biggest project ever made in Animate/Flash. I have around 3 hours of footage with hundreds of scenes and thousands of sound effects + voices. One option might be to do all of the audio work again in another application, but:

1. That is completely unacceptable, it should work in Animate. What is in the timeline should be what gets exported. It almost does with the MP3 format, but the longer the video that is exported, the more out of sync it gets towards the end.
2. I have been using Flash/Animate since the 90s, and this issue has persisted for as long as I can remember, it should have been fixed already.
3. I don't have months upon months spare to redo all of my work because the program is buggy.

I have tried it on CS6, CC2016/17/18, the latest official version and a prerelease version. I have tried it on multiple PCs over the years, as well as two PCs in the past few days. It still occurs.

Please, for the love of god, fix this longstanding issue. Give us some way to export long scenes with audio that stays in sync and doesn't crackle. If videos using the MP3 export option would stay in sync - that alone would solve the issue.

If anyone at Adobe finally wants to tackle this mess, please get in touch and I can send you numerous .FLA files where this occurs 100% of the time.

[n. tilcheff]

I'd suggest exporting SWF with RAW audio at max quality and then using SWIVEL to convert to MP4. 

If you don't use Advanced Layers this will work well.

Otherwise export WAV and a PNG sequence and assemble the video in Premiere.

In Premiere right-click the audio track, choose Speed/Duration... and input the video duration to match the length of the video. All will be in sync.

[Interinactive]

Unfortunately Swivel doesn't work, it never accepts the SWF, I assume it's because of the advanced layers you mentioned.

The second suggestion is one I have yet to try, mostly because it will be very time consuming (and it would have to be an MP3 rather than a WAV, as WAV files include the crackling). Not just for the time that it takes to export large sequences, but for the hundreds of files and hundreds of thousands of frames that are involved. It's crazy that the onus is put on the user to sort that out for an application designed for animation.

It only works correctly 100% of the time as an SWF. However, since most people aren't going to be exporting SWF files as the end result anymore (for obvious reasons) it is unreasonable to expect customers to do all of this extra legwork for the formats that are still widely supported.

[n. tilcheff]

I fully agree with your concerns. Animate has been in a very bad state for very long.

I know of the crackling, but am yet to determine when and how it happens. I have heard it on some computers when using ADPCM in a SWF. On my current configuration I never experience any crackling in CS6 and mostly use the RAW/SWIVEL combo to produce high-quality videos. But then again, I only use CS6 and publish as AS2 Flash Player 11 SWFs.

If those Advanced Layers are not needed for your production, try opening a file in CS6 and swich it to AS2. It may be worth trying. If you need the Advanced Layers, you're stuck with the other option.

I wonder if the crackling is somehow hardware related and is not in the actual WAV, but how your audio card plays it back. Try to export a WAV and then transcode it into an MP3 somewhere else just as a test.

Or it may depend on what the audio sources were. I always make sure I feed Flash 44100Hz 16-bit audio. If sources are 48000Hz maybe the conversion to 44kHz while exporting is causing the crackling...

[Interinactive]

I always used that audio format, every sound effect, voice, piece of music etc uses 44100/16bit.

Unfortunately I need the camera layer so I think CS6 is out

I will post a FLA later on of a file that crackles every time

[Interinactive]

Here is a .FLA where the crackling happens all of the time: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PzcYTJDu4XoJUJaNNgwxTkRmqZRLWLgq/view?usp=sharing

Here is the audio file itself: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OGDPstarvRZHTR3Vh5aS8VvwOMsFSk4y/view?usp=sharing

The only way it won't crackle is if it's exported as MP3, but then there's the issue where long scenes go out of sync (and this is from a ~3 minute long scene)

[n. tilcheff]

If you change the sharing option to 'anyone with the link' I'll have a look.

[Interinactive]

Sorry, try now. I've attached here as well.

I have tried this one 2 separate PCs and a Macbook, it crackles in all of them

[n. tilcheff]

I did a bunch of tests.

No crackling when you export 44kHz Stereo WAV from CS6.

Animate 21.0.9 export crackles.

So... Open your files in CS6 and export WAVs from there. It's very fast.

Then get the picture out of Animate since you've used that stupid camera - either render MP4s and then replace the audio with the clean WAVs from CS6 or render PNGs and do the work in Premiere. I'd prefer the PNGs as these will be lossless sources.

Once you set up a template it only takes seconds.

You will still need to match the duration of the video by manually changing Speed/Duration of the audio.

Attached is the WAV which I exported from CS6.

[Interinactive]

That does seem to work

However, with CS6 it exports all scenes in a single wav, so in a file of 40 scenes it's hard to tell where the 40th scene comes in precisely. Which means I have to delete 39 other scenes first, each time, for each WAV/scene export. So the process would be:

1. Export footage from modern version of Animate

2. Export WAV from CS6, after manually deleting up to 80 scenes (my file with the largest amount)

3. Open in Premiere

4. Unlink audio

5. Relink with new audio

6. Ensure duration of footage and audio matches

That sounds better than the PNG sequence, but I would have to do all of that around 300-400 times. And if I change any one thing in any individual scene/source file, I would have to do it all again.

If audio simply worked in the latest version of Animate, the process would be:

1. Export scene as video

It is truly madenning that this works in a version of Flash from 8 years ago. Why did it change? Why hasn't it been fixed since? Why doesn't Adobe respond here or to any email? Easily the most frustrating company I've ever had to deal with.

[n. tilcheff]

Ever since the name change, Animate has been in a terrible condition.

Using scenes has always been considered bad practice. I wrote about this in my acticle on workflow in 2011, and at the time it was common knowledge at all studios I had worked at since at least the days of Flash MX.

Same applies to using the terrible implementation of the Camera and basically every other new feature that came in recent years.

I'm sorry that you have to go through such a tedious process!

It's just how things are. Animate is a mine field of bugs and I only use it for testing as I don't consider it fit for professional work.

You have seen all the threads in the pre-release forum form the last few years. People have given up. I don't even want to start talking about how I feel about the state of Animate.

Maybe you can split your large files and reorganise your sources to have only one scene per FLA?