Lost Audio!

Apr 26, 2011

Josh Webb
By Josh Webb

Our team has been experiencing an epidemic of problems with ppta management. We’ve been losing full audio recordings (75-100 slides worth) due to ppta files being altered/renamed through the publishing process.

We’ve learned a few fundamental lessons on our own – don’t rename ANYthing, retain pptx and ppta files together at all times, never Save As, try restarting your computer in the event of a loss, and backup files as often as possible. However, we’re still experiencing the problem and it has become extremely costly, as you can imagine.

How do we avoid or correct these nightmares?!

4 Replies
Brian Batt
13 years ago04/26/11 at 10:00 am (UTC)

Hi Josh & welcome to Heroes,

If you are working in Presenter '09 and notice that your audio is missing, please review the following article which outlines possible solutions:

http://www.articulate.com/support/presenter09/kb/?p=643

Be sure that your presentation is located on your local hard drive (your C: drive).  Working on a network drive or a USB (external) drive can cause erratic behavior, including loss of resources.

Sara Michels
almost 11 years ago05/31/13 at 8:54 am (UTC)

I am having a similar issue, I have recorded about 20 presentations with 12 hours worth of audio.  Since I generally work off a shared drive, I had to copy all my files to my hard drive, work on them and then copy them back to the shared drive after publishing.  

I now have to make a slight modification to the slide master graphic and when I preview the slides all my audio is missing!!  

I have the .pptx and .ppta file in the same location, but I cannot get it to work.  I have also tried renaming the file so it creates a new .ppta file but still no results.  

Please help, I cannot afford to re-record 12 hours of audio again! 

Peter Anderson
almost 11 years ago05/31/13 at 9:03 am (UTC)

Hi Sara, welcome to the community

If none of the steps within this article help you recover your audio, we'd be happy to assist. 

First, create an Articulate Presenter Package of your presentation as described here. Then upload the resulting zip file from your computer on the second page of this form, and we''ll attempt to diagnose what's happening when we receive your upload. 

And in the future, you'll also want to be sure you're following some basic rules to prevent strange behavior:

  • Work on your local drive (your C: drive). Working on a network drive or a USB drive can cause erratic behavior, including file corruption, loss of audio, and other unexpected behavior. 
  • You should also make sure the directory path to your project files and your published output is less than 260 characters (for example C:\Articulate).
  • Avoid using special characters, accents or symbols in your file names.

Thanks, Sara!

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