PPTA file corrupting my audio and video
Feb 04, 2014
By
Ben Mueller
Over the years, we’ve had a bizarre issue with Articulate Studio (first with 09, and now with 13), and I wondered if anybody else was having the same issue. Every so often, we would lose all of the media from a project (audio and/or video). For years, we chalked it up to some kind of user error, and so we would go back and re-add all of the lost audio or video. You can imagine how annoying that was, but it happened just infrequently enough that we didn’t investigate the root cause.
When we upgraded to Studio 13 and it kept happening, I opened a ticket with Articulate, and they were able to tell me that under certain circumstances (a few listed below), Articulate will get confused and won’t be able to read in the current PPTA file, which is what houses (among other things) all Articulate media. Instead, Studio renames the PPTA file to [your-file-name]_old.ppta, and then creates a new PPTA file. So, the “solution” is to blow away the newly-created PPTA file, remove the “_old” from the original PPTA file, and the re-launch Articulate.
This is sort of okay, except that Articulate doesn’t tell you when it gets confused, and so you could be working away for hours on something before noticing that your media is gone. At that point, you’re either going to lose all data in the original PPTA file or the newly-created PPTA file.
So the best solution here is for Articulate Studio to not get confused. If that’s not possible (and I concede there may be very good reasons why it gets screwed up), then at the very least, Studio should alert the user that a new PPTA file is being created. If Studio is smart enough to figure out that a new file must be created, the it’s got to be smart enough to alert the user, right?
My understanding is that Studio gets confused most often if it’s working on a file that’s not on the local C drive. This includes networked shares, mapped drives, etc. In my case, I’ve got Studio 13 running on Windows 7 inside VMWare on a Mac, and the actual data files were sitting on the Mac’s file system.
Anybody else have similar issues?
5 Replies
Hi Ben, I've definitely had this issue in the past, and recently when I've gone to update old courses, and I completely agree it's very frustrating. I work on local C drive only, so I'm not sure the "remote drive" issue is completely to blame. Other developer colleagues have had the same problem too.
We haven't upgraded to '13 yet, and I was really hoping this wouldn't be an issue any more, so I'm quite disappointed to hear it's still happening. Your suggestion of, at the very least, a warning as to when an "-old" file is created would certainly help.
Can an Articulate representative let us know if there's plans to squash this bug?
yes, this has happened to me twice this week! After searching the forums, I opened the PPTA files and got the audio back. I also work on the local drive and have Articulate 13. It is frustrating!
Well this is happening to me know and it's driving me crazy + taking up so much time without making any progress - any fixes?????
Hi Graham. I'm sorry you're encountering such a frustrating issue. This article provides some information on missing audio. Check out some of those scenarios and see if they apply to you.
Otherwise, can I ask what sort of setup you're using to author your projects (Windows version, if you're saving to your local C: drive, how you're importing those media files)? Are the media elements disappearing from your timeline, or perhaps are they not working in Preview mode?
I would also want to know if it is happening in all projects or just one in particular. If you are having issues across the board on your projects, I would start with a repair of Presenter '13.
Hi Graham!
This thread is a bit dated.
This discussion is closed. You can start a new discussion or contact Articulate Support.