• Editor
  • How do I import music to the timeline

I'd like to first add audio for events, so you can preview audio happening during animation. Adding audio to sync entire animations with would be awesome. Unfortunately it will be some time before either of these features can make it in.

In the meantime you can still animate and sync to music at runtime, it just won't be as easy. Identify a location in the audio then choose the frame that matches. Spine uses 30 fps so audio time 0:46 is frame 1.533 (46 / 30). You can type in a fractional frame number next to "Current" or hold shift when dragging the timeline.

At runtime animations can be synced to audio by using the audio time instead of wall time.

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3 months later

I just wanted to post the same feature request ๐Ÿ˜ƒ because I was about to do an animation where I need to use sound effects...

Being able to play sounds would be really great.
We will trigger them by events (I guess), but right now there is no way to test it.

As I'm now looking at the tree and thinking.... hmmm...
Now we have there

  • root
  • draw order
  • images
  • skins
  • animations

What if there was another folder named "sound" or "audio"?
It would behave the same way as Images. I would select my folder where I have sound effects and it would show me them in folder hierarchy.

And then:

I would be able to drag & drop the audio file under event.
Just like a slot under a bone, or an attachment under a slot...

So if there was a key in timeline of this event - it would play the sound which is under it.

More fancy stuff for future:

  • The event keyframes which has audio inside could have maybe a different color?
  • checkbox for "loop", "play once" and "play # times"
  • drag multiple sound effects on one event (something as a skin... for example if I have a shield, it could have multiple different sounds for a hit with different weapons - iron bang, wood crash... etc.)
  • or volume control? And be able to key volume control ๐Ÿ˜ƒ (I wouldn't really need it lol)
  • hmmmm pancakes....

Hmmmm this would be actually a pretty good feature...
I could have it all done by myself as a designer (animation & sound) so the coder wouldn't have to code it for every sound...

So less effort to get it done, less people, less time, less budget... etc.
Moreover, I'd say that there is a lot of sounds in games. It would be great to be able to have it in Spine though...

What do you think? :sun:

Oh my... more I think about it, more I want it ๐Ÿ˜ƒ

Use case examples of animations of:

  • explosion of an object + sound
  • laughing character + sound
  • crying character + sound
  • firing a gun + sound
  • firing a ....shotgun... + sound
  • firing a.............machinegun ๐Ÿ˜ƒ + sound
  • collision of two objects + sound
  • and more more more more more...

All those need a precise syncing. Ooooohhhhhh ๐Ÿ˜ƒ

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Having Spine play audio would be great and it is planned, but since it isn't too hard to do via events, it isn't high priority right now.

3 months later

Has Spine being able to import audio gone up on the priority list yet?

Not yet, skinning and IK pinning for now.

10 months later

Adding sound effects and music is a must I think because it's only way to sync animations to music. It's quite simple to implement via free Ogg Tremor and I did this in my own animation editor and engine, audio just needs to be synced with current frame. Of course some tweaking was necessary but not much. Audio integration could be done on all platforms using free portaudio library: http://www.portaudio.com to lower the implementation effort.

5 months later

Just wanted to drop in and support this feature request. Spine is by far the best animation software for games that I've ever used. Ability to have the time line trigger a sound file in editor would make it perfect for me though. Sometimes it's important to sync sound and animation to work seamlessly together and having editor to playback desired sound file would really help and speed up this work.

Cheers for all your hard work on this awesome piece of software, my life is so much easier thanks to Spine.

9 months later

Hi, we want to purchase Spine Pro but we cannot use it without this feature. Our game has specific needs that each animation must be synced with sound. Please add this feature.

Thanks,
Nick

nade made a tool to do this, ill see if I can find it

2 months later

Guessing this isn't a major priority still?: )

  • Just wondering if sound playback via events (or similar), within the editor is on the 'editor roadmap' somewhere in not too distant future? ๐Ÿ˜›
  • +1 for feature (for what it's worth)

@BinaryCats
"nade made a tool to do this, ill see if I can find it"

  • whats the tool or possible workaround to save exporting/updating contents/compiling build/project each time to check finer audio elements?

thanks in advance.

7 months later

Any news about sound integration into Editor?

There are a lot of animations which depends from sound duration and it is difficult to create them without possibility to see sfx length in timeline and to listen it while animation playing.

It is important to sync audio and animation to work together seamlessly.

It seems like its more feasible for an editor-only feature, but will be hard to explain to users why runtimes don't support it (which is a huge project)

Xelnath wrote

It seems like its more feasible for an editor-only feature, but will be hard to explain to users why runtimes don't support it (which is a huge project)

Eh, they could just fire events from a imported clip, with the data (E.g. Clip name, speed, start and stop). I don't think spine runtimes should even play sound. But they could auto generate sound events which would fire when an audio clip plays and stops

a month later

Any Updates on the sound? Would be very helpful for a dialogue animation!

Thanks!

+1 for the soundtracks on the timeline. I'm currently animating characters dancing on music :sweat: :time: :whew: