Audio Completely Disappeared

Hi Jeff!

I'm sorry to hear your project audio is missing. See this article for reasons audio could be missing and how to correct it.

i have reinstalled the trial software and am hoping for the best.

So...

It is a known issue where audio disappears and the suggested advice is update the software so it hopefully doesn't happen again?

I exported a presentation, saved it, went back to retime some imported audio and everything is gone.  Based on the link above, that's tough luck?  I don't believe the version I was on was out of date by much more than 10 days, maybe.

Am I missing something?

Tony, did you have any luck?

Thanks.

Nope, I had to go back and redo all the audio. I have no idea why the audio was wiped to begin with. I'm fairly certain I had the latest version installed and I definitely didn't install any updates that would have deleted the audio. It was there one moment and then gone the next.

Pretty ridiculous that this is an issue among so many others. It's definitely not the first problem we've ran into when using this software where the solution was to "to deal with it".

Hey Wes - you only mention the software being up-to-date. Did you go through the other common items shared in the article above? We share those as they resolve issues for the majority of our customers. I wouldn't say 'known issue' in the sense that it's something we can resolve when most of the time the issue lies within the users setup or moving of files, but known enough for us to have a solution to share with various ideas, yes. You can also work directly with our support engineers here if needed.

Hi Jeff - Sorry to hear that the documentation did not work for you. I did not hear back from you previously, so that did not allow me the opportunity to further assist you. Our intent in sharing helpful articles is not for you 'to deal with it', but as I mentioned above it is typically the key to solving for the majority of our users. You are always welcome to pop back in to let us know if it does not assist or work directly with our support team here.

While I glanced over all of the suggestions in the linked documentation, none returned the contents of my project's narration folder.

As far as I can tell, this is a bug, 100%.  I can not think of an instance where a user would want the previously imported audio to be removed from the presentation without their interaction, or at least a dialog offering an option to cancel.

If a user inadvertently uses a network resource, how does Presenter interpret that as a request to delete contents from it's own project files?

I can not speak for Jeff, but I after reading Jeff's issue and the recommended solution, "Installing the latest update won't restore missing audio, but it'll keep you from encountering known issues in the future.", I would consider that the end of the story, time to deal with it.

Hi Wes and Jeff,

I'm truly sorry to hear that you've lost your audio files and were unable to bring them back using the steps noted in the documentation Leslie shared. Our intent with sharing it and having all those items noted is that we've seen similar behavior before and it's often resolved with those simple steps and either helps find the lost audio or prevents it from happening again in a new file. 

Specifically the items about working off a network or USB/shared drive are known to cause corruption within Articulate projects, and a cause that we currently can't control based on the infrastructure of Articulate products and the varieties of individual users systems and settings. That's why you'll see the team here in the Community forums and our Support team remind folks to work on local project files, not just the Presenter file but any files you're bringing into a project as well. 

If you continue to experience this behavior, and can help us track down steps that will replicate it, we're happy to dig into it further and I'd invite you to connect with our Support Engineers here to share those steps and at least one copy of a problematic file. 

If you have any other questions we can assist with, please don't hesitate to let me or the rest of the team know! 

It has happened again.

I uploaded a few videos (.mp4 files) into my presentation and when I went to save the Powerpoint I was prompted to save the ppt in a macro enabled format, which I went ahead and did. I renamed the new macro enabled presentation so if I ran into any problems I could fall back on the original. The videos worked fine in the macro enabled version, but my audio has been completely wiped again. I went back to the original file and the audio has been wiped there as well. 

I have the latest versions of Powerpoint and Articulate installed; I am working from my local hard drive; I do not see any ppt files with "-old.ppta" at the end of them; and I did not change the location of the files.

Can someone please explain why this is happening? I don't know why this would cause it, but perhaps the video file sizes are too large?

Hey Jeff,

Thanks for coming back around to keep us posted on this issue. We've seen resources get lost when you try to open in an earlier version of Powerpoint, but you mentioned being on the latest of each so I'd want to have our team take a look at your Presenter file and do some additional investigations. Are you still able to find the original .PPTA file? We'll need that Presenter package created to be able to look into this issue, and I'd also make sure that when you were changing the name of your file as saving it, you kept it matching the name of the .ppta file - as if not they'll no longer be associated with one another. 

Hi Ashley,

Thanks for the offer, but it seems I was able to get the file to save properly with the videos and narration working. I went into an older saved copy of the PPT file and edited it from there. I made a few changes and this time I wasn't prompted to save the PPT as a macro enabled file, which seems to have resolved the issue.

Thanks,

Happy to hear that Jeff and thanks for the update! Don't ever hesitate to reach out - our support engineers are also accessible 24/7 here.