[QUESTION] Status of "Adding sound to slides" and possible workarounds

[papertree0]

Having had a look around here (#375), I can't quite get a sense on what the progress is on audio playback.
It seems that audio should be playing back on HTML converted files (#382), but using add_audio() and convert doesn't seem to do that.
I understand this is being worked on, but I was wondering if there was any workaround for this (that doesn't involve a video editing software)?
Thanks!

[jeertmans]

Hi @papertree0, thanks for your question.

This used to be worked on by myself, but I did not make any progress for more than a year now, because I don't have much time to work on this.

Manim Slides already has everything needed to play audio from files: the issue is that the partial movie files generated by Manim do not contain any audio track. Manim actually only adds the audio track to the complete video file, when partial movie files (i.e., video files for each slide) are concatenated.

Therefore, the easiest (in my opinion) would be to directly contribute to Manim by adding audio track to partial movie files instead. This work was started here ManimCommunity/manim#3763, but it is still incomplete.

I just made a call for contributors on Manim's Discord channel.

If you need a workaround, you can also post-process the video files in slides to include audio, that will work.

[papertree0]

Hi! Thanks for the quick reply.

I was aware of the issues, but thanks anyway for pointing them out for future reference! I will try to contribute to ManimCommunity/manim#3763, although I am using manim as a tool and have not looked into the inner workings of the code.

I was able to add sound to the slides using your post-processing method, so thanks a lot!
To be specific, this is the process I followed:

1. In the slides folder of the project, locate the video file that I want to have sound
2. Drag that file into Reaper (any other DAW that works with video/video editing software would work too, of course)
3. Drag the desired audio file into Reaper and sync it with the video
4. Export the video with the same name as the original clip
5. Replace the original clip in the slides folder.

This works like a charm! However, it would be a bit tedious to repeat this process for many files (I was lucky that I only needed one audio file in a video), so the manim feature you mentioned would be the ideal pathway forward.

Thanks anyway!

[jeertmans]

Happy that it works :-)

I will close this issue as I think the questions were answered, but feel free to re-open or open another issue if you still have more questions!