Troubleshooting Audio Playback in Maya

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Okay, let's test your troubleshooting skills:

You've brought an audio clip into Maya, but you can't hear it when you playback your scene. Your speakers are on. Your computer's audio settings are normal. There's nothing wrong with the audio file, and you can see the waveform in the timeline. You right click on the timeline to make sure that the proper audio node is activated, and it is.

To make matters even weirder: when you scrub in the timeline, you can hear your audio scrubbing, but when you hit the play button, there's no sound. What's going on?

If this has happened to you and you found yourself pounding your desk in frustration, don't be discouraged. It happens to a lot of people. The first time I ran into it, I was completely stumped.

The solution:

Open up your scene preferences and make sure your timeline playback is set to "real-time." If you have it set to "play every frame" or some other setting, Maya will let you hear the audio when you scrub but not on playback. Once you change it back to real-time, your audio should play just fine.



On a side note - audio files can slow down your scene a bit if you're working on an older computer. The best workaround is to narrow your range slider to as short a time-span as you can. It helps quite a bit.

That's all for today's tip.  Make sure to visit Set Driven Key for more.