Audio dropping on two slides in live version of course only

Aug 06, 2021

I have a course with two slides where the audio stops in the middle of the slide but the timeline keeps going. It only happens on the live version of the course, and I only experience it in Chrome and Edge.

It doesn't happen in Storyline, on Articulate Review, on Firefox or Internet Explorer, and I'm told it doesn't even happen on the LMS testing site. It only happens on the live LMS site. One issue is that I do not have access to the testing or live LMS, so it is difficult to troubleshoot the problem.

Why might audio be dropping on two specific slides in Chrome and Edge on the live LMS but not in the testing LMS or anywhere else? Thanks.

6 Replies
Leslie McKerchie

Hello Marshall, and welcome to E-Learning Heroes. 😊

Thanks for reaching out and sharing what you are experiencing in your published output.

It looks like Google corrected an issue with media playback in their latest update, Version 92.0.4515.131.

I'm not sure of the update rollout, but be sure to update Chrome when available and let us know if this resolved the issue for you as well.

I do not have any additional information for Edge at this time.

Laura Douglas

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.

Michael Stuart

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!