It could help immensely with timing if sounds automatically set to the right position in the sound file based on what frame you’re on and you didn’t have to start from the frame the sound starts on.
Even better, sounds could be added when exporting the animation (of course I understand if this exporting presents difficulty at the moment).
Bump for asking if you think this is possible because it would be very good for lip syncing and possibly also setting something to music.
In Flash i think there are (or at least were, back when i used it) two main options for audio playback on the timeline…one was event, and the other was stream.
Current Pencil works much like “event”, where you have to play through the starting frame of the audio in order to hear it. This is fine for very short sound effects.
If i understand you, you’re wanting something more like “stream”, which would allow you to move to any point in the timeline, and hear the audio relative to that point when you started playback. I agree that would make syncing audio with the video much easier, particularly if you have relatively long sound clips.
If this never happens, i suppose you might consider working with shorter audio clips, like just a few seconds each, so you don’t have to spend time playing though audio you don’t need to hear.
You’re absolutely right, I tried out flash one year because they had it on a school computer. There are workarounds, I would probably fix it mostly with video editing because even if you try to line up sounds Pencil can lag.