'13 - Slide Advances Before Completed

Oct 21, 2013

This is an old bug, apparently carried over from '09, but I'm unable to work around it this time.

I have a slide with 10 seconds of animation, but no audio.

Regardless of whatever I put in for option timings (advance slides with no audio after N seconds, etc.), it races through the slide in 1-2 seconds and advances to the next slide without completing the animations.

So, I import a 15-second audio clip. Now the slide plays for 15 seconds (as it should) so that all the audio is played. Animations go to completion, slide advances normally.

Next, I remove the 15-second audio clip. Slide still plays for 15 seconds (the time from the previously deleted audio clip). (This is the old bug from Presenter '09.)

THE QUESTION: Does anyone have a suggestion on how to make a slide with no audio play to completion?

6 Replies
Terry Wang

In my original file, 3 slides without audio, after a new slide with a short video was inserted between last two slides,

then, when playing the video, it can advanced to last slide even the Video has not finished.

As above mentioned, the navigation was set "restricted" and slide advance was set "by user" in advance.

I will try your case within this week! 

(In your file, as you said, if it has been published, my suggestion is that you can publish it again by changing file name and identifier. )

(Identifier was produced automatically by the software for tracking same file, you may find the keyword in some threads which may give you a better hints.)

Russell Still

Hi, Terry. The problem appears to be a bit more insidious. In older versions of Presenter, a slide would run until either the audio completed OR the animations completed. That is how it should work. However, in '13 it appears that the slide arbitrarily stops after the audio completes. Big problem on any slides whose audio is shorter than the animations. It's a complete and utter show-stopper for me.

The older problem of "old" audio timings remaining even after removing the audio is a nuisance, but can be worked around by including short, silent audio clips. This bug may or may not be related to the one described in my first paragraph.

Russell Still

Yes, I did this yesterday and did get a reply, however it wasn't overly helpful. My presentations tend to push the animations/timing limits so I probably bump into more obscure problems than most people. I did find a bug in the Articulate/Options/On mouse click setting.

It lets you specify how long to wait on mouse click animations before resuming. Turns out it adds that amount of time to the timeline even if there are no mouse click animations. This was giving me fits yesterday but I set it to .1 seconds and that problem has gone away.

The problem of the timeline ending when the audio ends remains. There are plenty of times when I want the slide to sit there for several more seconds after the audio stops (for the content to "sink in") before advancing. In Presenter '09 the slide timeline ran for either the length of the audio OR the length of the animation timeline. It appears in Presenter '13 it stops when the audio stops.

Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard

Hi Russ, 

It looks like we've got this going in two threads now - but I see that Vira tested your files you shared and was able to replicate it and reported it to our QA team. She shared with you that in the meantime, try the workaround suggested, which is to use the Sync Animations feature, to manually control the slide duration. 

Russell Still

I don't think the Sync function works like this. Of course I may be boneheading it, but it appears to me that the Sync stops when the audio stops so no way to increase the slides timeline further. My workaround is to import some arbitrarily long silent clip into the audio, then delete out part of it so that the resulting audio is the same length as my animation timeline.

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