The same old sound problems in Maya

[Steve Davy]

Can anyone give me any pointers on *exactly* what specs needs to be used to get sound files into Maya's timeline successfully?

I am frequently handed audio files in unsupported formats by clients and producers, and have to jump through a bunch of hoops to get these successfully imported.

So far as I am aware, on Windows Maya still only supports WAV and AIFF formats (ridiculous that MP3 is still not supported), but even within these formats it seems to be incredibly picky. For example, if I take an MP3 and export it as a WAV from Adobe Audition, it will still not import to Maya and I have to resave the file from Quicktime to get it to work. This a pain in the butt, especially as frequently the audio gets updated, or shots change meaning the VO has to be cut up differently, yadda yadda yadda, meaning I often have to go thru this annoying process more than once.

Anyone got to the bottom of this?

[Osko]

I also noticed that different programs have their own way of exporting WAV format :). I use Audacity to export WAV for Maya. It's free, open source, cross-platform, not the best looking interface :) , but it's a very useful program, it works very fast (drag and drop in the window, file->exprot ). http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

I don't think there is another way .. it has to be WAV.

[Steve Davy]

Thanks, I may grab a copy of Audacity.

It's just kind of ludicrous that Maya's audio import is so finicky. Historically Maya's strength was supposed to be in character animation, which absolutely often requires sound to be imported. Ten years on and we're still stuck with the same lumbering WAV only import option that it had in 1999.

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Date: Fri, 8 Jun 2012 16:17:48 -0700
From: osk...@gmail.com
To: maya...@googlegroups.com
Subject: [maya_he3d] Re: The same old sound problems in Maya

[stephenkmann]

I generally do my audio conforms in QT, most of us already have it, just open and export
i generally use AIFF as well, they just seem to work better

rate of 44.1 and sample size of 16

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[Steve Davy]

It's not really practical to cut up a large multi-shot VO file in an app such as Quicktime, which is what I frequently need to do.

I need to be able to see a waveform.

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Date: Mon, 11 Jun 2012 16:13:54 -0400
Subject: Re: [maya_he3d] Re: The same old sound problems in Maya
From: stephe...@gmail.com
To: maya...@googlegroups.com