Audio Progress Bar Stops at 8:53, then out of sync

Apr 13, 2011

Mark Northam
By Mark Northam

Hi -

We just deployed our first course with Presenter and have encountered a big problem with the audio scroll/progress bar. For lessons longer than 10 minutes, the counter will often stop exactly at 8:53 although the audio keeps playing. This can sometimes be triggered by scrolling around in the audio, but it can also happen when the lesson audio is played from the beginning without any scrolling. Once the counter freezes, it gets way out of sync with the audio, to the point that the audio may finish playing and the lesson is over, but the counter still shows 20% of so left to play. This has led to some very frustrated students complaining that there is "Missing Audio" in these lessons, when in fact the audio plays just fine, but it's the counter getting wildly out of sync with the audio causing people to THINK that the lesson is not over as the counter/audio progress bar only shows 80% complete when the lesson ends.

Again, the audio plays fine, no problems there, this is strictly a counter/progress bar issue. I hate to remove the counter and progress bar because it's a useful way for students to be able to rewind within a lesson and listen again to a passage if they need to.

We're using 128k stereo MP3 files (because they contain music) and the publish settings are not set to Web since that by setting crunches the audio to mono.

Any suggestions? Could really use the help as we're getting more complaints by the day. Other than that, Presenter has been working great!

Thanks,


Mark

11 Replies
Brian Batt
13 years ago04/13/11 at 8:29 am (UTC)

Hi Mark & welcome to Heroes,

Flash supports a maximum of 16,000 frames.  At 30 frames per second (which is the default setting in Articulate software), that translates to 8 minutes and 53 seconds. 

The following Adobe support document provides additional information on Flash limits:

http://www.adobe.com/support/flash/ts/documents/bigflash.htm

If you change the "frames per second" setting in Articulate Presenter to 15, then you should be able to record / play up to 17 minutes of narration for a single slide.  Here's a quick guide:

15 fps  >>  17:00

20 fps  >>  13:20

30 fps  >>  08:53

To change the "frames per second" setting for your presentation, please review the following article:

http://www.articulate.com/support/presenter09/kb/?p=165

Mark Northam
13 years ago04/13/11 at 8:35 am (UTC)

Hi Brian -

Thanks VERY much for the quick reply. A quick question if I may: our presentations don't use any video, just static powerpoint slides that display while the narration plays. If I reduce the FPS from 30 to 15, given the fact I'm using 128k MP3 audio files, will that degrade the audio? I've usually heard of FPS in relation to video only, never considered whether it was relevant for audio. Thanks again for your help.

Ashley K
12 years ago03/20/12 at 9:06 am (UTC)

Hi Peter,

I'm having a similar issue to the one Mark first mentioned above. I have a presentation of 100+ slides, most of which have audio attached. On certain slides, the slide audio and animations play to completion, but at the end of the slide, the seeker bar timer shows that there is 1 second remaining on the slide (e.g. 0:29/0:30). Is there a way to "force" the seeker timer to display equal times (e.g. 0:30/0:30) when the slide completes?

I adjusted my FPS rate in "Publishing Options" to 20 FPS, then republished the course. The issue persists. Any recommendations or additional suggestions you could provide regarding this issue would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

Ashley

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