The Tips in detail

 "Using sound to animate."

Synchronizing your animations with sound is a bit difficult, unless you get hands on the knowledge about how to use the Audio Controller. Assuming that you know where to find the Audio Controller and knowing how to set it to active, there still are some tricks you might want to know.

The higher the oversampling, the smoother the sound's curve will be. Sure, the sound won't sound nicely with a high oversampling, but you are not intending to listen to it. Instead you want to translate values from the sound to your animation.

Sounds are - basically - alternating curves. The amount of changes per second makes the frequency (measured in Hertz (Hz) or kilo Hertz (kHz) for thousands of changes per second.) If you have got a rough frequency curve, your animation with the Audio Controller will tend to be somewhat jumpy. It might be a good start to set the Controller's oversampling to maximum (1.000) when you start, but this for sure will differ depending on your animation and the sounds you are using. Also modifying the threshold (applyable values are between 0.0 and 1.0) will ease the response of the object to changes in the sound-curve.

The higher the frequency, the higher the translated value. Consequently low frequencies are resulting in low values. As you can see a shift from a low to a high frequency will result in a strong shift in values. Ie. if you are controling the aspects of your object by using the Audio Controller, the object might be changing strongly on high frequencies but a sudden shift to a low frequency will also suddenly and dramatically slow it's changing down, perhaps almost to a halt. Have an eye on this when choosing and remastering sounds. To ease such shifts you might want trying to set the threshold.

Max does not give you many tools for modifying sounds. You'll have to go and get those from somewhere else, since 3DSMax is not for Sound-and-Video-editing. You can add a sound to your animation that will be included in your resulting rendering (Hint: Have a look at the track view...) but you can only include ONE sound to be audiable along with the metronome. So you will be by far better off by using proper editing software where you can mix sounds and add them to your anim after rendering. Remember that the realtime-sounddevice can not save it's recordings within Max...