Audio missing in presentation copied from another machine.

Hi Scott!

This is our documentation for the most common reasons that audio may go missing. This is our recommendation when working on an Articulate Presenter course in a collaborative environment with other developers, to avoid file corruption, loss of resources, and other erratic behavior.

If you need to repair your installation, you can follow the instructions here.

Leslie,

Thanks for the information. I created an Articulate package and moving it from machine a to machine b with the same result the audio was missing on machine b. I went back to the user and asked a few more questions and found out that she had started creating the presentation on machine a, then had to move to machine b where she recorded the audio, then had to move back to machine a to complete the presentation. It was at this point she noticed that the audio was missing.

It makes me wonder if somewhere on machine a there is a cache file or folder that is storing the state of the presentation as it was created on that machine and not updating it. Any thoughts on this?

I also noticed that update 4 came out yesterday, I am going to update the installations and see if that resolves any of these issues.

Scott

Thanks for the update Scott

It appears that the update has resolved this problem. Although one thing I noticed is that my troubleshooter presentation created a couple of .old files, but the audio for all slides was present in the ppta file as well. What are the situations that these .old files might be created?

Scott

Hi Scott! Glad to hear that it is working for you now.

Here is some information regarding the -old files:

As a safeguard, Articulate Presenter will add -old to the end of the ppta file name if it becomes locked by another user or computer service, or if it becomes temporarily inaccessible for any reason. Some scenarios where this can occur—though not all possibilities—are described below. (The -old.ppta file should contain your missing audio; see the next section for recovery instructions.)

1. The ppta file is locked by another service: If another computer service (for example, a backup service) accesses the ppta file while you're working with it, Presenter may not be able to update the file with new information. In this scenario, Presenter renames the ppta file to -old.ppta, and a new (empty) ppta file is generated.
2. You create a copy of an existing presentation: When you use the Save As command in PowerPoint to create a copy of a presentation, Presenter also copies the corresponding ppta file. This can cause a conflict if there is already a ppta file with the same name. Rather than overwriting the existing ppta file, Presenter renames the file to -old.ppta.
3. You have a *.ppt and a *.pptx file in the same folder with the same name: If you have a *.ppt and a *.pptx file in the same folder with the same name, the Articulate ppta file for both presentations will have the same name. If you switch back and forth between the two presentations, Presenter will change the name of the ppta file to -old.ppta and create a new (empty) ppta file.
4. You move the PowerPoint presentation to a folder where there is already a ppta file with the same name: If Presenter detects that you've moved a PowerPoint presentation, it'll copy the corresponding ppta file to the new location to keep your resources intact. If there's already a ppta file in the new location with the same name, Presenter will change the name of the file to -old.ppta and create a new (empty) ppta file.