This often confuses newbies but it can be even a bigger problem on large projects that experienced users create.

REQUEST:

• Provide some sort of "Find Audio Assets" feature
• List all imported audio files
• List the ITEM to which they are attached

EXAMPLE:

• Have your avatar hold a stick
• Your avatar hits a table with a stick, so you add a "thump" sound
• Later you want to replace this with a better sound effect
• THE PROBLEM... where is your "thump" sound?
• On the stick?
• On the lamp?
• On the avatar?
• On the terrain?
• On the project?

Now what do you do when you have a lot of sound effects and a lot of objects.  You have to keep opening every likely candidate on the timeline and click the "sound" button, and then make sure your timeline is showing the right timeframe to see it.

AND IT GETS WORSE:

• What if you drag a sound file onto your scene, but you missed the target object?
• You thought the sound was attached to the lamp, but it's actually attached to the book that was on the table
• It's like finding a needle in a haystack

Does this only happen to me?  I know I'm easily confused, but I doubt I'm the only who's ever had this problem.

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iClone 7... Character Creator... Substance Designer/Painter... Blender... Audacity...
Desktop (homebuilt) - Windows 10, Ryzen 9 3900x CPU, GTX 1080 GPU (8GB), 32GB RAM, Asus X570 Pro motherboard, 2TB SSD, terabytes of disk space, dual  monitors.
Laptop - Windows 10, MSI GS63VR STEALTH-252, 16GB RAM, GTX 1060 (6GB), 256GB SSD and 1TB HDD

Something I do that is simple.

Add a Box or a Ball to the scene. Name it "Sound Effects".

Import all your sound Effects to that object... Now you have all sounds used on one object, so it's easy to locate and align on the time line.

If the Sounds overlap, add a second sound effects object.

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" If I had Alzheimer's (Old Timers), would I know it? "

As Colour likes to say, "Simple minds think alike."

I've done that too, espcially for music.  I name them "MusicBox -Song1" and stuff like that.  But I'm not as consistent as I ought to be, especially for sound effects.  It seems natural to put a "barking" sound on the dog, for example.  But I know I've "missed" the target when applying a sound, and if you don't notice it right away, it can be a challenge to find it later.

P.S.

You took this for granted...  Remember to make the musix boxes DUMMY PROPS so they don't appear in the rendered video.

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iClone 7... Character Creator... Substance Designer/Painter... Blender... Audacity...
Desktop (homebuilt) - Windows 10, Ryzen 9 3900x CPU, GTX 1080 GPU (8GB), 32GB RAM, Asus X570 Pro motherboard, 2TB SSD, terabytes of disk space, dual  monitors.
Laptop - Windows 10, MSI GS63VR STEALTH-252, 16GB RAM, GTX 1060 (6GB), 256GB SSD and 1TB HDD

why do you guys even do audio in iclone ? :p

my turn to be swoopish lol

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Dear sw00000p Jr.,

It depends.

Sometimes I need it to coordinate things.  If you want something to happen with a music cue, that's a lot easier to do with the music in iClone.  Even if you replace the sound later in your video editing tool.

Sometimes it's simply convenient.  If I can drop the sound into iClone and avoid having multiple project files to keep track of, why not?  This way if I move something on the timeline in iClone, I'm done.  I don't have to remember to move the corresponding audio clip in my video editor, too.  Once isn't a problem, but as you start to collect multiple clips, each with multiple audio layers, it can get to be a lot to keep coordinated, especially for a leaky brain like mine.  If I didn't make so many iterations, it wouldn't be much of a problem.

I understand the merits of your position, though, and can't argue against it.  I would like to move more of my audio assets to my NLE.

Example of something you CANNOT do in iClone... You cannot change the volume of individual lines of dialogue.  Your avatar has one volume setting for the entire project.  So if you want to adjust the volume, it would be a lot more convenient in that case if all you dialoge was in your NLE (with your iClone track muted).  In five seconds you could bump up the volume on a one sentence.

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iClone 7... Character Creator... Substance Designer/Painter... Blender... Audacity...
Desktop (homebuilt) - Windows 10, Ryzen 9 3900x CPU, GTX 1080 GPU (8GB), 32GB RAM, Asus X570 Pro motherboard, 2TB SSD, terabytes of disk space, dual  monitors.
Laptop - Windows 10, MSI GS63VR STEALTH-252, 16GB RAM, GTX 1060 (6GB), 256GB SSD and 1TB HDD

one concern I have about the audio in iclone is that it seems to load the files to memory, and not read direct from disk. imo this would free up resources, allow the program to run faster, and further give you better organizational options since it's reading from disk and not memory. it would probably remove the option to embed the sound into the file - unless they came up with a better file packaging scheme that would include audio and video as a separate entity.

I'm guessing that everything in a project file loads to memory, in order to read from disk, it would have to be a structured file system. This could probably be circumvented by using gaming style compression. Files would be larger but readable directories in packages. This way some things load to memory, the rest are read from disk. Guildwars 2 does a great job of this, the game is huge and infinite....but if you look at the game, it's one huge file. The compression design was created by the ceo and allows the game world to be insanely large with little to no lag otherwise it would be impossible to load a game with that much content to memory.

point being, if they took that gaming route, you could make your sets as big as your hard drive allows it because your assets would be read / rendered from disk only when needed - add to this, directory tools, you have your audio organization tools.

I have no idea what im saying, i think i've read too many technical articles lol

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I tend to keep sound outside of iClone as well and do everything in my video editor. 

One reason is that since I work with image sequences I would have to do a separate render for the sound anyway. Another reason is that it's much easier to organize the sounds in an editor and replace them (in Sony Vegas there is a Replace option for that) or add effects to them. Yet another reason is that iClone renders sound at 32kHz, reducing quality.

I'm all in favor of the feature (it already exists for external files), but I also know that I will rarely use it.

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