@Jordan_River_Studios Hey. Thank you for asking for my opinion but I think the other messages have been clear.
In any case I’ll just leave some considerations in addition to that. First off some of these requests have been put on the roadmap as part of the sound category, but as David mentioned, developer time is scarce and depending on contributor interest it might or might not be added anytime soon.
Often times added features are contributed by priority related to animation production as well as developer interest and willingness to work on it for months (if not years)
On the other hand consider that the concept of convenience and workflow can’t always go hand in hand. Of course no one expects you to have a video editor open all the time while working with Pencil2D. Because you shouldn’t need that.
Pencil2D is a tool to create animation first and foremost, it’s not a complete video production software and has never been marketed that way AFAIK. Therefore it’s important to understand the limitations of such tool and how it should function in your particular workflow.
If you’re following an moderately modern workflow you shouldn’t find issues while using a variety of tools to get the desired result.
In a typical tv show or audiovisual product usually sound is either pre-recorded or mocked-up and then put into an animatic. This animatic is just the storyboard with proper timing, dialogue and key sound effects as interpreted from the main script.
Animators usually take a dossier / folder with the shot’s information. The Storyboard, the Layout, the dialogue if any, the character model sheets, etc.
The dialogue and key effects are used ONLY to match the timing of the animation, but they are not expected to come from the animation export because those are already setup in the animatic which is usually handled by an editor or the director themselves.
Then after a shot is finalized it’s sent and replaced in the animatic editorial project. The animator does not need to handle sound in the same way that a video editor or sound effect artist would. Traditionally you don’t really need to cut it, trim it, or record it in the animation tool because that’s already handled outside of the animator’s labor scope and either given to you or put afterwards (e.g voice-overs).
That said, for independent filmmakers or animators this kind of feature surely can help if you make the animatic in Pencil2D, but even then the software has not been engineered from scratch to hold hours length of footage like a video editing software.
If a professional animator is working in an animated feature film or even a short film by themselves I can assure you they’d be using a dedicated tool to do all the editing and sound matching work, they won’t be using their Harmony or TVPaint stations for that.
Also while you may record yourself to mockup the dialogue to hone-in the timing of a shot or scene, this is done by reading directly from the script while acting out the actions to infuse proper timing. You don’t read over existing animation at the very beginning since that is a different task usually done instead at the end of the production stage when the animation is already made (again, voice over work) and you as the voice actor have to match the timing of the existing mockup dialogue (if any) and the animation.
So yes Pencil2D could get a few convenience tools in the future to assist the independent filmmaker, but at its core it is not a tool designed to do something beyond hand drawn animation creation, and so I personally recommend doing the sound work outside before or after you animate. Import only the necessary sound effects or score to create your animation performance with matching timing, and then edit it properly using a relevant tool for the job.