Working with Audio

You have a couple options for getting audio into your course. You can record directly into Presenter, or you can record using an external audio program and import the files into your course.

For this project, I recorded audio externally, using Audacity. I like recording externally because I have better access to my audio files for editing, cutting and processing. Also, a lot of clients will either hire voice talent or record their own audio and send to the designer.

But Presenter '09 is just as capable of recording and editing audio and we'll look at using Presenter '09 for some pickup audio a little later in this chapter.

If you're following along, I'm working in Lesson Files > Chapter_06.

Note: You'll want to work with audio recorded at 44Khz/16-bit PCM WAV. Here's a tutorial on some common problems associated with non-standard audio and how to resolve them.

Option 1: Importing a Single Audio File

Let's begin by brining in a single audio file.

Click Articulate > Import Audio to open the Import Audio dialog window
Select the first slide, Introduction
Click Browse to navigate to the Chapter 06 and double-click the Audio folder
Select Introduction.wav and click OK
Test your slide by clicking Articulate > Preview > Preview This Slide

That’s it. You can repeat this process for the remaining slides or proceed to the next step to import multiple files.

Option 2: Inserting Multiple Audio Files

We have 16 slides in our course and 14 slides have audio. There has to be a quicker way to import audio, right? Of course. Here we'll insert a range of audio files.

Go to Articulate > Import Audio to open the Import Audio dialog window. You’ll already
Click Slide 2 Safety First and click the Browse button to return to the Chapter 06 > Audio folder
Shift-click SafetyFirst.wav through Step-02.wav and click OK

Why didn't we select all files?

Slide 5 doesn't have audio. It's an Engage interaction and not a PowerPoint-based slide. When importing multiple audio files, you can only import a sequence of files. If you imported everything, you'd have to return to the non-audio files and remove the audio. I find it easier to import the audio in small batches rather than going back and removing files.

Import the Remaining Audio

After the last batch of audio is inserted, you'll repeat the process to import multiple audio files beginning at Loosen the Wheel Nuts (Slide 6).

What's Next?

No matter how tight your script is, mistakes, do-overs and re-records are unavoidable. In the next lesson we'll look at some ways to record pick-up audio and edit existing audio.

Working with Audio