Tutorials at Lizard Lounge Graphics : Maya - Audio Data into Maya

A while back I was working on a project where we wanted to have objects in Maya "driven" by music. It turns out that the included audiowave plugin has not really worked since version 4.x of Maya. This is a bummer, but not to be detered I came up with a recipe to manually export information from AfterEffects using Trapcode's SoundKeys. This is a great to way to work as it allows you to export up to 3 data tracks in one pass from your audio file. Here's the recipe.

The recipe: (as tested under Windows)

Set up an AE project with a soundkeys effect track, tweak and apply.
Expand the track so you can select and copy the range of keyframes from
the timeline in AE.

Open a text document and paste in the AE data.
What comes out of AE:

Adobe After Effects 6.0 Keyframe Data

   Units Per Second   30
   Source Width   640
   Source Height   480
   Source Pixel Aspect Ratio   1
   Comp Pixel Aspect Ratio   1

Effects   Sound Keys #1   Output 1 #22
   Frame
   0   0.17489
   1   0.261281
   2   0.361762
   3   0.400085
   4   0.411538
   5   0.434799
   6   0.41712
   7   0.422151
   8   0.43181
   9   0.411811

Run a find and replace (requires a decent text editor that can spot tab characters - I use Crimson Editor) with a simple expression the unwanted data with nothing to strip it away. You may need to run this several times.

Examples of simple text expressions:

"^\t[0-9]\t"
Locates at the start of a line: two tabs with the decimals 0-9 between
them.

"^\t[0-9][0-9]\t"
Locates at the start of a line: two tabs with the decimals 10-99
between them.

"^\t[0-9][0-9][0-9]\t"
Locates at the start of a line: two tabs with the decimals 100-999
between them.

This is what you want when you are done:

The resulting file can then be saved and imported easily into Maya as a Move file (*.mov).

(click to enlarge)
Go wild from there.