Audio Does Not Play in Review or LMS, Intermittent Problem

Feb 08, 2021

Hi All,

A new problem surfaced this week with audio not playing on certain slides when Articulate Studio/Presenter is published to Articulate Review or an LMS.

  1. The audio will always play fine in Articulate preview mode
  2. The audio will often not play on some slides in Articulate Review
  3. The audio will often not play on some slides in the Absorb LMS

More Details:

  1. Publish the course once, it all works fine. Publish it again, the audio on some slides will stop working.  Publish it again, it might start working again. The problem is intermittent, but it fails much more often than it succeeds.
  2. Sometimes the audio will play for a second, and then cut out. If the user clicks on the seekbar, the audio will always play at the point clicked. 
  3. Often, earlier slides in the deck will not work well and later slides will work fine.

Troubleshooting:

  1. We have already tried a variety of audio files, MP3 and WAV
  2. We have already tried different computers and different Articulate 360 licenses
  3. We have already tried multiple courses including a brand new course with several completely blank slides and simple audio added.

Here is one of many, many slide decks that is giving us trouble. See attached. 

6 Replies
Keith Kemsley

Hi All!

I wanted to report back on this. Articulate Support is working on this browser-security-policy auto-play conflict. We are very much looking forward to this fix. In the meantime, we are happy to report that the new import feature from PowerPoint/Presenter to Storyline is good and we have been able to recreate this particular course in Storyline for delivery to the client.  

Lauren Connelly

Hi Keith!

I'm happy to share that we released the fix for this bug where audio randomly stopped playing in published courses in today's Studio 360 update!

Now all you need to do is update Studio 360 in your Articulate 360 desktop app!

You can see the other features and fixes in the Studio 360 Version History.

Lisa Spirko

If this is a truly intermittent problem, this probably won't help you, but mentioning this just in case:

You might want to check your privacy/security settings for your browser. I adjusted my browser settings last week, and today started encountering issues with audio not playing for a course I'm testing in Review. I just realized that must be the problem. In Chrome, go to Privacy and security, and then Site Settings. Scroll down to the bottom of that window and click Additional content settings, and then Sound. Click Add and add the URLs you want to allow, such as 360.articulate.com for Review and your LMS's URL. Then restart your browser.

Hope this info helps somebody!

Lisa