Hi. Can any one point me in the direction of a tutorial on how to control sound in iClone 6? Tried the basic stuff in the manual but it doesn't work as expected. I'm trying to mute 3 vocal tracks with out losing the main vocal track. I can use the sliders to mute one track but this mutes everything so I must be on the wrong train of thought. I.e. Muting one track leaves the others alone, as per studio mixing desk. Any input would be appreciated.

This may or may not help... but for audio the best thing to do is use a DAW (digital audio workstation). If you don't have one already, you can download audacity which is free. That's where you really want to do your mixing. For iclone I only use audio tracks to trigger vismes. When you want a character to not talk, you just delete the visme data and their lips won't move. For me it's simpler to have an audio track per character, so when one talks and the other is silent it all sort of works out (if that makes sense). Then I'll have a nice one mixed master audio track with music sound effects etc. that I mixed in my DAW outside of iclone that incorporates the audio speaking tracks I used in iclone.

I'll use that file in my video editor along with the iclone video files. A good trick is to keep the audio track in clone the same length as the scene you will be using in the final film. For example, if my final scene starts with 5secs of intro music and foley with a fade in from black, then the first character starts taking, I'll use that entire audio clip length in iclone. It makes video editing really simple. The iclone video will be longer than what you need. But you plop it in your video editor and the timing will match up perfectly. Then you can trim 5secs of the iclone video but still have perfect timing with the final audio track. I hope this all makes sense. It does in my head!

My "NEWEST" Latest  Movie Made With Amaaaazing iClone


—> High Noon”ish” in Narrow Valley<—

I agree that working with audio is best to be done outside iclone on any DAW software of you liking, what i would suggest is that you record all dialogues first, then animate and edit the video, when you have your final edit do the audio post (effects, music) that way you won't have any sync issues as Long as your audio Project is setup to the framerate of your video

I support the previous comments.

More an more, I use audio in iClone only as a placeholder and as an aid to the animation.

Often I will add sound to dummy props that I rename appropriately ("Explosion" or "Rhythmic thumping" or "footsteps").  I don't need all my audio in the iClone file, but adding some key ones helps me get my timing right, and it helps me with the creative process too.

I use audacity to do my recordings, noise removal, and any modification such as echo or pitch shifting.

Then I do all the "mixing" in my NLE (video editor), totally replacing everything that came from iClone.  That way I can have multiple sound tracks, and I can change the volume of a track over time.  In iClone, you change the volume of the voice track, but it's a global change; you cannot keyframe the volume over time.

I like lots of granular files.  Each sound effect is separate.  Each paragraph of dialogue is it's own file.  Each song, etc.  That makes it easy to slide things around during the final editing.  You end up managing more files this way (bookkeeping does matter), but you get a much better end result.

Good luck and have fun.

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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

Thanks for your replies, which I will come back to when I get to the mixing stage. It looks like I may have not used the workflow correctly and ended up with a problem I haven't described very well to you and other learned people on here.

So how this problem came about. Using an Avatar I created as the main character I imported an audio file (complete song) into the Viseme track. I then worked on the Lips track just for this master avatar. Worked great but hit a problem when I added three more avatars. These were to do a song and dance routine together with in the song. Their sections were repeated at each chorus.

Another member explained how to use the collect Clip track to clone the song and dance clip (Viseme and Motion) to save time duplicating the clip section for each of the other avatars. (A sort of cut and paste.)

The problem now arises on play back. Each time I hit the vocals on the song and dance clip I have a four stack of audio with the corresponding increase of volume. This obviously drops to normal level as the clip plays until the next duplicated section. The actual audio in iClone is not important as I will add a master audio track in video editing. I just want to mute the Voice track for each of the three added avatars,(to save my ears!) and allow me to keep the Lips/ Motion track on all avatars for further tweeking. I need just one audio track for timing purposes only. Is there a work around or have I screwed up big time?

I think you can:
- Make a an audio track that you need for timing purposes
- Mute the Avatar audio, without deleting anything
- Add the timing audio to a dummy prop

I'm not sitting at my fun computer right now, but I'm pretty sure avatar volume is separate form the others.

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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

Thanks for your suggestions.

So here's what I did. Made dummy prop and assigned the whole song audio to it. This gave me a prop with the song assigned to a Sound track in Time Line. Double clicked Dummy Prop Sound Track box which highlighted in green the whole track. Clicking the highlighted track or the Musical note with three lines in the top Menu opened a Sound Settings box. Volume was set at 100%, not Muted, No Sound. Going back to the display window I selected Music Volume and slid to full on - pressed play- No sound.

Zeroed Music Volume then selected Vocal Volume and slid to full on. Song now plays. Also volume control and mute settings now work in the Sound Control Settings box but still with all the other tracks. It is possible to knock the Dummy Prop sound out of the mix while the other tracks continue to play but this is the reverse of what I need to achieve.

This means, to me, the sound track is wrongly routed to the Vocal Volume and not the Music Volume which is what I would expect. As it stands there is still no way to mute all the avatar voice tracks without losing the Dummy sound track. mmm!

Sorry I missed your post last night.  Thanks for the detailed description of what's happening.
I'm at work (gotta pay the bills), but if nobody else chimes in earlier, I will make it a point to look at it tonight and see what I overlooked.

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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

Thank you for your continued support. No need to apologise for missing my post as it was 2.00am here when I posted after trying for a full evening of head scratching. By testing I found I could mute part of the original section I copied in the Timeline Collect Clip. ( Did this by having all motion clips and Lips track sorted, for one avatar, then zeroed the volume control and selected the section required within the Collect Clip). With this saved I could keep all the Viseme and Motions and have no sound on the clip. Saves doing all the motions and Viseme set ups again but still a fair bit of work tweeking the lips and dance routine again but a whole lot better than doing the dance and viseme from scratch for three avatars. Still searching for the ideal answer though.