Soundtrack doesn't play smoothly.

mrcharlsburns · Post by **mrcharlsburns** » Mon Jun 06, 2005 5:05 am

Hi,
Before anything sorry my English.
I'm trying the 5.1.1 demo version of Moho.
My problem is that soundtracks sound quite weird. You can hear the sound cuts (gets mute some milliseconds) twice a second all the time.
I've read some tips about sound playing slow, but this is not the case. FPS while playing the animation correspond to FPS of the project (or even more

). I've tried MP3s of different bps, WAVs and they do all the same. Even the supplied samples ("clinton" and I don't remember which other) behave that way.
I've tried playing them even without animations. Just the sound.
I'm almost sure it is not a CPU usage matter. When I playback a sound in Moho CPU usage hardly reachs 30%.
I have a 2.4 Ghz processor and I'm using Windows XP.
I have some samples of this behaviour by recording the "what you hear" sound using Moho and a player so you can see the difference but I don't know how to post them here.
Best regards.

cribble · Post by **cribble** » Mon Jun 06, 2005 5:46 pm

Not a bug, it hapens with everyone. One very important tip, don't use mp3's, only use them at a later, "ready to export," stage

1) Don't use Mp3's, the computer has to decode mp3's in order to play them meaning more RAM/porcessor usage.
2) Do use .WAV's. It sometimes helps to lower the Hz rate. I recommend about 22,050Hz.
3) Got into "Animation" and click "Allow Frame Skipping." It skips frames in order to keep up with the music.

Hope this helps.

mrcharlsburns · Post by **mrcharlsburns** » Mon Jun 06, 2005 8:36 pm

Hi, Cribble:

Thank you very much for your answer.

Anyway, I tried all the tips you mentioned without a satisfactory result. When I followed some tutorials that included sounds I used the WAVs supplied by Moho and had the same problem. The "clinton.wav" used in the lips sync tutorial behaves the same way.

As I mentioned previously the CPU usage during the animation stayed below the 30-35% so the program had some remaining processing capacity to be used (65-70% !). So I hope it is just some settings to be done in my PC.

Regarding the FPS, the showed FPS were the expected (24) while playing the animation so there would be no need to skip any frame.

Anyway, if it's a known (and accepted) behavior I would say that the developer should work a little more on this because it's quite annoying working that way. A 2.4 Ghz processor (despite it is not an up to day processing capacity) is not a slow processor. I would expect a software like this one to respond in a better way.

Thank you once again.

Regards.

mrcharlsburns · Post by **mrcharlsburns** » Mon Jun 06, 2005 9:46 pm

P.S. my RAM is 512Mb.

mrcharlsburns · Post by **mrcharlsburns** » Tue Jun 07, 2005 2:49 am

Hello again:

Cribble: I just realized that the sample supplied by moho in its tutorial is an mp3!!!. I converted it to a wav and the performance was better (some clicks here and there but better in general)
I'll wait till a version that support mp3. (My humble suggestion to the developer is to include a wav instead of an mp3 in its tutorials until Moho can manage mp3s correctly)

As I said in a previous message great software like Moho should have a much better performance when managing sound. Nowadays, an mp3 shouldn't be a big deal for a processor. All this makes me feel that this program is not making the most of my system's capacity (regarding sound, of course). As a comment, playing just the sound (no animation at all) and using a 11 Khz WAV the sound gets slow sometimes (having the "Allow frame skipping" turned off). That's very surprising to me.

Thank you,

Regards.