How to decrease volume of sound clip in Animate CC for HTML5 output?

[David Orban]

I'm working on a 2-minute presentation in Animate CC. There is a voiceover track and a background music track, both of which play for the entire animation sequence. I'm trying to reduce the volume level of the music track so that the voiceover track is the center of attention. Unfortunately, when selecting the music track, the Edit function is dimmed-out within the Properties window. 

I tried editing the original music track in GarageBand, to reduce the overall volume, but upon import into the Animate document, the volume level appears to be the same as the track that it replaced.

What options do I have for reducing the volume of the music track?

[ClayUUID]

If you can't hear the changes you made after actually importing and publishing with the new audio clip, it means the old audio clip is cached. Clear your browser cache and try again.

The only other option is to dispense with timeline audio and manually play the background music yourself using the built-in SoundJS library. This would allow direct manipulation of the volume parameter.

BTW, I hope you're not using a single two-minute audio file for your voiceover. HTML5 mode does not support synching audio with the timeline, so an audio file that long would almost certainly end up out of synch after the first 30 seconds or so.

[David Orban]

Thanks for the Cache tip. I will check it out.

It's my first time out with Animate, so, yes... I was planning on using a single audio file for both the voiceover and for the music track. I can break-out the music track into a loop. The voiceover will be a bit trickier, but I'll see what I can do. Do you happen to know if I can simply "cut" the voiceover track into segments within the timeline?

[David Orban]

I'm looking to deliver this video over the web, with, of course, an emphasis on viewers on mobile devices.

Should I be utilizing something other than the  HTML5 canvas?

[ClayUUID]

No, you cannot slice up audio files from within Animate. You'd have to do it manually.

Myself, for a non-interactive production I'd be authoring in AS3 mode then converting the final product to a video file and uploading it to YouTube. That's the most bulletproof solution.

[David Orban]

Thanks, appreciate the help!

[David Orban]

What do you suggest using to convert the .fla file to a video format that would be acceptable for Youtube...?

I tried exporting to a .mov file directly from within Animate, and ended up with a 4 GB file that "plays" but includes neither the voiceover track nor the background music track, nor an embedded animation video bumper at the end of the file...

[Colin Holgate · Accepted solution]

When you import H.264 to then animate on top of it, that video does not get exported. You would use something like Premiere to combine the exported animation with the video.

For sound, look in Publishing Settings and set the sound to be Raw, 16 bit stereo, 44.1 KHz, for both Stream and Event sound.

Is the sound in the timeline of your animation, or is it played with code? If you're doing anything with code, work out how long the whole animation will take in seconds, and use that as the export duration. If it's only timeline animation, select the Until Last Frame option.

Try a shorter export, to see if sound is exporting ok.

Once you have your final video ready for YouTube, take the file into Adobe Media Encoder, and use a high quality H.264 preset and upload that new file.

Put this into a layer in frame 1 to improve the video quality:

stage.quality = "best";

[David Orban]

Thank you, this is very useful!

[eliyah]

he actually can slice it up. it's not super handy but if you copy and paste the frames that contain the soundtrack a few (or a lot of) times - in each separate "slice" of 2 key frames you can move (when u edit the envelope) the track back oand forth and this way creating slices of the same music track, I did it with voice over track.

the best is to each time copy the previous slice that you did so that you wont have to push the track from the beginning each time