Audio

Add music, voices or sound effects to your animation and line each sound up with the frame where it happens. In this guide you sync a clap to the exact frame where Blue’s hands meet, then learn every audio control in the app.

Tutorial: sync a clap to frame 14

A sound looks right when its loudest moment lands on the frame where the action happens. In this tutorial Blue claps. You find the loud spike in the clap’s waveform (the picture of the sound), put it on frame 14, then make the hands meet on that same frame.

1. Open the audio panel. Click the music-note Audio button at the right end of the timeline header. A panel opens under the layers and says Add music, dialogue or sound effects.
2. Import the clap. Click Import audio…. In the app you then choose a file on your computer; this playground brings its own Clap.wav. The clip appears on a new track named Clap, starting at the playhead. Its waveform is a flat line (a quiet room) and then one tall spike: that spike is the clap.
3. Put the spike on frame 14. Drag the clip to the right. It moves in whole frames. Stop when the spike sits in the column under 14 on the ruler. In this recording the spike is 3 frames after the clip’s left edge, so the left edge ends up on frame 11.
4. Key the clap pose on frame 14. Click frame 14 on the ruler to move the playhead there. Press A (Add frame) to make a key on Layer 1, then drag Blue’s two red hand dots together until they touch.
5. Play with sound. Press Space. You should hear the clap exactly when the hands meet. If it sounds early or late, drag the clip one frame and play again.

Import and place sound

The audio panel is hidden until you open it, even in a project that already has sound. A small dot on the Audio button tells you the project has audio. Closing the panel never mutes anything: the sound keeps playing with the animation.

1. Click the music-note Audio button at the right of the timeline header. In Advanced the panel opens under the layers and uses the same ruler, zoom and playhead. In Simple it replaces the frame cards as an Audio tab; close it to get the cards back.
2. Move the playhead to the frame where the sound should start.
3. Click Import audio in the panel’s toolbar (or Import audio… in the empty panel) and choose a file. The clip starts at the playhead, on the selected track, or on a new track named after the file.
4. Or drag a file from your computer onto the panel: it lands at the time and on the track under the pointer. Drop it on the row + Drop a clip here to create a track to give it a new track. You can also double-click an empty spot on a track to import into that track.

Longer than the animation? When the recording runs past the last frame and no layer is locked, importing also adds frames so the animation lasts as long as the sound (one undo step). If a layer is locked, the animation stays as it is and Fit animation appears in the audio toolbar: click it later to extend the animation to the end of the audio. It adds frames; it never stretches the sound. Playback and export always stop at the animation’s end.

File types: the desktop app reads WAV, MP3, AAC/M4A, FLAC, Ogg, Opus and AIFF. The browser version reads WAV directly, and the other formats up to 8 MiB and 2 minutes each. The recording is stored inside your .styk project when you save, so you don’t need to keep the original file.

Move, trim, fade and split

Everything happens on the clip itself. Hover over a clip to see its trim edges and its two round fade handles.

Click a clip to select it. A Clip button appears in the audio toolbar; it opens the clip’s controls: its name, start and end times, a Volume slider, Split, Duplicate, delete (the bin) and Details. Right-click a clip for the same commands plus copy, cut and paste.

While a clip has keyboard focus (click it first), these keys work on audio only, never on the animation frames behind it:

Exact values in Details

Double-click a clip, press Enter or click Details to type exact numbers. All times are in seconds:

• Start · seconds: where the clip begins in your animation.
• Source in · seconds: how much of the beginning of the recording is skipped (what a left trim changes).
• Duration · seconds: how much of the recording plays. It can’t go past the end of the recording.
• Clip volume · %: 0 to 400, default 100.
• Fade in · seconds and Fade out · seconds: 0 up to the clip’s duration.
• Track and Track volume · %: move the clip to another track and set that track’s volume.

Frames and seconds: frame 1 starts at 0 seconds. At 24 fps, frame 25 starts at 1.000 s; at 12 fps, frame 14 starts at 13 ÷ 12 = 1.083 s.

Worked example: a punch sound hits 0.200 s into its recording, and the fist lands on frame 25 at 24 fps (1.000 s). Either set Source in to 0.200 and Start to 1.000 (the silence is trimmed off), or keep the silence and set Start to 0.800. Putting the untrimmed clip’s left edge on frame 25 would make the hit 0.2 s late.

Mix several tracks

Use one track per kind of sound, for example Music, Voices and Effects. Click Add track (or Add empty track in the empty panel) to make one. Each track’s header has:

• its name: click it and type to rename;
• M to mute the track and S to solo it. When any track is soloed, only soloed tracks play;
• a volume slider, 0 to 400%;
• the ⋯ button with Import audio here and Delete audio track.

Clips on one track may overlap. The clip and track volumes multiply: a clip at 50% on a track at 50% plays at 25%. If loud overlapping sounds crackle, they are going over full scale: lower a clip or a track. Muting keeps the clips and their timing; it only silences them.

Options: scrubbing and ripple

Click Options in the audio toolbar. Both switches are off by default.

• Hear audio while scrubbing: plays short snippets of sound as you drag the playhead, handy for finding a word or a hit by ear. Use normal playback to judge longer sounds and fades.
• Keep audio in sync with frame edits: when you insert or remove frames on every layer, the audio after that point moves with them, and a clip crossing the edit is split. Changing frames on only some layers, or posing, never moves audio.

Changing the frame rate never stretches sound. Audio stays at its time in seconds, so the animation gets faster or slower around it. Set your fps before you sync, or re-check the sync after changing it.

Export with sound

1. Check that the tracks you want are not muted, and that the animation is long enough (use Fit animation if the sound runs past the end).
2. Click Export or press Ctrl+Shift+E and choose a video format.
3. Under Sound, keep Include sound on (it starts on when a track can be heard), then export.

The desktop app puts AAC sound in MP4, Opus in WebM, PCM in AVI and WMA in WMV. In the browser, MP4 gets AAC and WebM gets Opus when your browser can encode them; if it can’t, the export dialog tells you before exporting. GIFs, pictures and Pivot files never contain sound.

Limits

• 32 MiB per recording, 96 MiB of audio per project, and up to one hour of audio.
• 64 tracks, 4,096 clips, and 32 clips sounding at the same moment.
• In the browser: other formats than WAV up to 8 MiB and 2 minutes each. Use WAV or the desktop app for longer recordings.
• Audio belongs to the whole scene. It is never attached to a figure or to a movieclip.

Common problems

Related features