Configure the Audio Output

Listen to the sound of you compositions

Smode can manage high quality and high frequency audio output.

With ASIO device support, Smode also manages audio with very low latency.

First of all, you need to choose on which device the audio should be played.

For this, you just need to go to EDIT > Preferences (F11) > Engine > Audio Output:

By default the audio device is Null Audio (no sound).

If your audio device does not support ASIO drivers, you can select its Direct Sound driver or legacy Windows Audio driver.

If you do not want to set a specific Audio output device and simply use the Windows settings, then select “Primary Sound Driver” then Apply Changes.

The following Audio device parameters can be configured:

• is the size of the audio buffer in bytes (too large buffer introduces latency, too small introduces audio glitch).
• corresponds to audio frequency quality.
• opens the audio device control panel if any.
• True by default, it can be disabled if not used to obtain better rendering performances.
• is the window size of the Spectrum in samples.
• is the type of the spectrum visualizer.

To add an audio file into a Smode Document , you just have to drag the file in its Elements tree:

This creates a Sound Track Element.

Sound Track files format supported are .wav or .aiff.

Those files should contain mono or stereo audio uncompressed streams.

Samples should be encoded in unsigned 8 bits, signed 16 bits, signed 32 bits, float 32 or float 64 formats.

All sampling rate are supported, and automatically re-sampled to current audio device frequency setting.

Similarly to video layers, sound tracks have a Transport that can be played directly or automated via a timeline.

See “Advanced timeline editing” part of Animation with Timelines to see how to animate transports in timeline.

Note that if Smode is currently playing sound, this can be observed in the Devices tab on the bottom right of the main window:

This panel allows you to watch visually the audio waveform or spectrum of each channels.

If this panel has activity and you heard no sound, check if you have chosen the right audio output device in preference panel.

Then check if your Windows volume is not mute and speakers correctly plugged into the audio card.