Ok. So I'm working on games.
We're approaching alpha on a big project, and we just got our final audio samples in for the dialogue animation. Time to crank out some conversation!
Unfortunately, the takes are often broken up into 2 or 3 audio clips per animation - and it's really annoying to try and animate that way; have to keep switching back and forth between audio tracks while animating, which is annoying, and I can't get a full audio playblast to see if the results look right in context.
Another animator and I have tried writing expressions to swap the audio on the fly, based on current frame/frame range. No dice; the "setSoundDisplay" command won't update properly during playback; the wave loads on the timeline, but doesn't make any sound until playback stops and restarts. With some more work and other commands, I had the expression actually stop playback, load the new sound, restart playback, and explicitly move forward a frame so as not to get stuck in a loop... I've also tried using the "scrub" commands to try to force the sound to play.
The best I could get, was for the sound to play in a garbled sort of way; guess it just isn't going to work properly if Maya never gets a pause where it can cache the new sound.
So it seems like the only solution is to edit the wave files together separately. Only ... how? No sense requesting an expensive package like premier just to sequence wave files (especially since there are several animators who need to use this). Same goes for Soundforge... I think there is a free version of protools; but only on win98 boxes, and we're running 2k. Searching on the net, there seems to be a fair number of freeware audio programs devoted to distortion effects, but not many that will provide a decent way to sequence tracks... and fewer still that will allow numeric input for timing, or a convenient 30fps resolution.
Surely this problem isn't too uncommon...
Any suggestions?