Recorded PowerPoint narration does not work in Presenter 2013

Nov 12, 2013

I attempted to publish a PowerPoint containing audio narrated directly into PowerPoint using Presenter 2013; however, the audio is not being picked up by Presenter. If I preview the slide using PowerPoint, I hear the audio, but I don't hear the audio when I preview through Articulate or publish the course. It is also not present when I edit the audio using the Articulate audio editor. I ended up importing it into Storyline and it worked fine. Any ideas on how to get the audio to work in Presenter 2013?

16 Replies
Justin Grenier

Good Morning, Lu.

In general, narration that has been recorded in PowerPoint will not appear in the Articulate Presenter Audio Editor until you publish the presentation at least once.  PowerPoint narration will be copied into the PPTA file during publishing, and then it will be available in the Audio Editor for modification.

If you have published the presentation and find that the audio is missing from both the Articulate Presenter Audio Editor and your published Presenter output, please send us a copy of your .pptx file for a closer look.  Thanks!

Christine Hendrickson

Hi Vaughn and welcome to the community!

Sorry to hear that you're running into this problem as well. 

First, can you please confirm that you're working with local project files?

  • 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 (this includes spaces and underscores).

Additional information regarding "Naming Files, Paths, and Namespaces" in Windows operating systems can be found in the following Microsoft article.

Also, though the article below is for Studio '09 published audio, it may help with the issues you're seeing and I would recommend taking a look at the suggestions:

Articulate Support - Audio is missing or lost in published Presenter

If you're still having trouble, and you're not seeing a "Submit" button on the support case page, it might help to try using a different web browser. Or, you're welcome to share the file in this thread. Just keep in mind that if the file is too large, it may not upload to the forums.
Thanks!
Brock Parks

Hi;

I'm having the same problem; I tried the above options, of simplifying both the PPT file /publish paths & ,removing invalid characters from the file name, but still the audio doesn't get included. This is a problem because, although I can save a PPT as a ZIP and grab the audio from the extracted files there, there are often more audio files than slides. Since I'm not the narrator, or familiar with the content, trying to figure out why there are extra audio files is too time consuming. I'm using the latest update to Articulate Presenter 13, Windows 7, Powerpoint 2010, and using a PPTX file (created in what version of Powerpoint, I'm not sure, but it opens and behaves fine in Powerpoint).

Thanks!

Brock

Brock Parks

BTW, for those who are interested, I discovered that *if* you extract the audio from a Powerpoint PPTX by copying the file, renaming the copy's extension as ZIP, then extracting it, (as described in Leslie's article above), *if* you have more audio recordings than slides, you can find out which ones map to which slides by looking in the extracted folder's subdirectory, "ppt\slides\_rels".

Inside that folder will be a series of xml files, one for each individual slide, i.e. slide27.xml.rels.

Open each file one at a time, (in Notepad, if you don't have an XML editor), and look for the reference to the media file, i.e. media34.wav. 

Now you know which media file corresponds to which slide!

Just FYI,

Brock

Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard

Hi Todd, 

As I mentioned, you'll want to insert the audio from the Presenter tab vs. the Powerpoint import audio functionality. As for the change from Presenter 09 to 13, we always recommended inserting audio as such so I can't speak to why it may have worked previously for you.

If you're still having difficulty with your course, we're always happy to take a look. You can share a copy of the Presenter package here with us or send along to our Support Engineers as well. 

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