Audio Cuts out on random slides
Oct 16, 2013
HI there. We have an issue where the audio cuts out on random slides. For example: In one upload slides 5 and 8, the audio will cutout half way through. But it will always be slides 5 and 8 that cutout each time I replay the scorm presentation. When I expire this scorm and re-upload a new version, the audio in one or two other slides will cut out and the original slides 5 and 8 will work. I've tried viewing these on multiple browsers and the same slides the audio will cutout. Each new version that I try, different slides have audio that cuts out.
When I Upload the scorm package to scorm cloud for testing, there are no errors. When I play the scorm locally on my machine, the audio works great on every slide.
I bumped this issue up to our server support team and they believe the issue is the content build. I can't seem to get this issue figured out and it's happening on multiple scorms that contain a lot of audio.
Many thanks for your time.
--Justin
55 Replies
Michael, I found an odd work around that seems to be working. It is tedious, but not as complex. My audio played fine in the edit window, so it seemed like the data was there, so I exported the audio and then re-inserted it. It has worked about 95% of the time now. I have worked with Articulate and multiple LMS for many years now and this is the first time I have ran into this. With as many people that have had similar issues, it boggles me that there isn't a resolution at this point. "It's not our stuff, must be your LMS."
I'm glad it worked out! Honestly, aside from this one issue, I am nothing but satisfied with Articulate! It's awesome software from a great company with amazing customer support. I'm blown away by the possibilities with the newly-released 360° photo support. One day, when we change to a different LMS (or this issue gets addressed), my 99% positive experience might change to 100%.
May I ask - what LMS programs people are posting and what exports of the SCORM are they making? We have also had this happen on a course Exported in SCORM 2004 4th Ed P/F and loaded on Dayforce. Also I note that while I do not have any playback issues on a Mac in Safari or Chrome - I DO have issues on a PC in Edge or Chrome.
We do not usually export using SCORM. Our LMS uses mainly AICC. That said, we have never been able to solve the issue of audio dropping out. The best we've been able to do is to work around the issue by splitting up audio into multiple segments, which makes slide timing a bit more difficult. You may notice that the pages that have the audio issue where the exported content goes silent, that the actual audio track experiences a very brief digital "chirp" in the sound, even though that "chirp" was not present in the original recording. This anomaly coincides with the audio drop on the page. Even more frustrating is that when you make a new recording and eliminate this mysterious "chirp" another chirp is likely to appear in another audio track on another page, effectively dropping out the audio on that page. This has happened so frequently for us, I call it the audio-chirp "whack-a-mole" stage in course publishing.
I believe that there is some sort of error in the code that causes the recompression of audio file when it stores it inside the Storyline story file to cause these digital chirps to appear, but I can't prove it, so I have to just work around it. It makes working with audio very stressing, since there don't seem to be enough people having the problem for it to be taken as anything other than user/LMS error. :(
Best of luck to you!
Thank you for the additional detail - I too heard a digital chirp on our audio - That was defiantly not in the original file - and was sometimes small and not very disturbing but other times large and surprising. We would often simply replace the audio file again. We typically insert only .aif audio into our Storyline courses - it tends to sound better after it is absorbed into Storyline - and converted vs using .mp3 audio - which doesn't hold up to the layers of compression as well as the air audio - I only mention it incase that is another point of where or how the error is prompted. (and also worth noting the SAME Articulate review file is creating the error on a PC but not a Mac.)
Agreed. I suspect that audio chirp is introduced during the saving process of the story file. In other words: it's Storyline - not the LMS or browser - that's doing it. Not sure why the Mac version doesn't cause the error, but I suspect it's something to do with the CODEC employed in the conversion process. This must be a difficult issue to isolate, since Articulate has done a stellar job at isolating and correcting every other problem I can imagine. If this is the worst thing I have to suffer with, then I count myself lucky!