@helpme Hi. Unfortunately there are two different issues at play here.
The are as follows:
- Pencil2D uses a Memory Cache system which loads the frames into the RAM to be available for playback. By default the old number was 200 frames, but now it’s expressed in MBs and IIRC the default is 1GB (1024mbs) however with this in place you have to let the playback roll at least twice so the visual portion doesn’t stutter. This doesn’t affect sound AFAIK.
- Basically any sound lag you will experience is proportional to the amount of layers and frames the project has, and this is regardless of your computer specs (though it does help if the computer is “faster”). Consider that you are doing real-time playback so your computer will be constantly evaluating the project resources trying to catch up. No existing software does this properly. Even Adobe Animate has an offset problem.
However lucky for commercial apps they have a preview or pre-render system. In Animate you have the “Test Movie” option, and in Harmony you have the “Pre-Render Movie” option. Pencil2D does not have a similar feature implemented at the moment (but it’s planned)
It’s important to clarify that, from testing, no matter what you do the sound will never be properly synchronized during real time playback. The only way to listen to properly synchronized audio is to use the audio scrubbing feature or to render the movie (which we advice to do map a shortcut for export, and change the settings at the movie export dialog to lower the video resolution to 1/4th of the current size so it’s faster)
I personally recommend to use the sound scrubbing function for only lipsync and beat synchronization.
You can also read the Known Issues section on the following guide to learn a bit more about other potential problems that might be effecting your perception of sound during playback.