I have a fairly complex animation, and it’s timed very specifically to some pre-existing noises.
I rendered out the completed animation as an Image Sequence. I then imported that into a new .Blend file where I’d be working with the VSE. I also needed to bring in the audio from the original file. To avoid the time (and potential inaccuracies) of again bringing in all the audio files, I decided to instead just use the “Mixdown” to export them as one single audio strip: one that would already be synced up with the Image Sequence.
So I go to Properties > Scene > Audio > Mixdown to render out a .FLAC file, point it to the proper directory, name the file, but then as soon as I hit “Mixdown” in the export dialogue, I get that white box of death in the corner of the Blender window (I’m using Windows XP). The program freezes up.
So I tried exporting it in every format offered (FLAC, OGG, and WAV), but the same thing happens, every time: white box of death.
Now, I’ve used this feature in the past and I’ve always gotten the white box of death…but that usually just lasts for a few seconds, and when it goes away the new audio file has been created. But here, for a simple 1,000 frame sample, it’s freezing up every time.
Does anybody know why this is, and how to make the Mixdown feature work more consistently? I’ve always found it to be buggy (like the white box of death, for instance).
In terms of workflow, that’s what I’d do.
Dunno about windoze but on my linux system it works as expected. As a side note, I’ve been using it a lot lately for a set of videotuts and I have to say that it is slow and I don’t really understand why. And I mean slow when mixing down to a 2-ch wav file. Mixing down to any of the compressed formats is even slower. I don’t really remember it being that slow in the pre 2.5 era.
A workaround would be to hide all images/video, and select a container format that supports wav (e.g. avi) so as to avoid recompressing the audio. Then render out a video. While the video will of course be black due to lack of image input, the audio stream will be available and perfectly usable. The good news is that the video will be created very quickly as there is no image data involved. Then, use Avidemux to extract the audio stream from the video and you’re done. You could also use any other app you have that is able to extract audio from video.
I just used this feature to post process the audio of an edit that I made and found that it is indeed slow. But if you go to the folder you are outputting to you may see the files being written. Blender did say it was not responding but came back to life a few minutes later.
Sorry for the necro, but this is the first thing that comes up on Google for “Blender freezes on audio mixdown.” For future people, I found the problem was with an extension that adds some animation tools. Disabling the extension made the audio render much faster.