Audio stuttering when editing captions

I've never had this happen and I do a lot of captions.

Hi there, Gordon. So sorry you're running into this oddity with the audio!

Because you already went through repairing Storyline and this is happening on multiple files, this is an excellent opportunity for our Support Engineers to jump in! 

In fact, I see you're already knee-deep in troubleshooting with the team. I'll follow along to update this discussion with what we discover!

It looks like the issue is with the Sophos anti-virus software.  The Sophos tech support said I should ask for a list of "recommended exclusions" for the anti-virus scans, so that we can add them thru our central control panel.

Thanks for coming back with this insight, Gordon. Interesting find!

I shared your latest update with John as we continue to work closely with you on this. He'll be in touch directly, and I'll keep on following the case! 

It's becoming very convoluted and frustrating.  I'm at USC, and so our Sophos is centrally controlled.  I don't have any power (nor do my IT people) in being able to turn off services.  I'm going to put in a request to USC IT for excluding the folder list that John gave me, but I have no idea if they will honor my request.  In any case, it's already taken way too long, and I'm going to be continuing to lose time doing actual work. 

None of this happened until we started doing the captioning.  There didn't seem to be any problems before that, although I'm late in the game coming to 360.  We used Storyline 2 forever.  But the feature I was very excited about now is turning out to be a problem.  Disappointed.  Programs that use a lot more resources, like Adobe Premiere for example, have no problem running on my machine. 

Hello Gordon!

I understand how this frustrating on your end, primarily when it's affecting your workflow! 

As Katie mentioned above, John is updated with the comments in this discussion and will continue troubleshooting after we hear what your findings are with the request to exclude the folder list.

I'd encourage you to continue updating John via email so that we can find a fix!

Wow, I think we just found the problem with Storyline, and it doesn’t seem to involve Sophos.  It seems if you open up the captioning window before the waveform gets drawn on the audio track of the timeline, the stuttering happens.  Seems to be only the captioning window that causes this, so we’d never encountered it before.  Cautiously optimistic.

Hi Gordon,

Glad you were able to find the cause of the issue! And thanks for popping back in here to let us know what was happening, as others in the community will find this useful!

This week I encountered the same issue as Gordon, and likewise, eventually realized it was opening up the file to caption it before the audio had loaded/drawn completely.  And once it happens, you can't get rid of the stuttering until you close and reopen the file. In more extreme cases, only the very first part of the audio shows up. It's as if the audio is loaded into working into RAM incorrectly, and can't fix itself until the file is closed and it's dropped back out of RAM.

Occasionally, I encounter this same stuttering when I proof a compiled file from my drive; but the problem goes away if I replay the slide.  No client has encountered this yet that I know of.

This is with narrated presentations where the audio is in 30 second to 1 minute lengths, brought in as 96kbps mp3's.

I'm about to switch over to an SSD Drive (from an old hard drive), so if it's an issue of the audio file not be able to be read quickly enough off the hard drive, maybe that'll make the problem go away.

***

I'll just add that I also had a stuttering problem with a single slide, both in Preview and when Output, which was a 96kps 44khz  32 bit float mp3.  I changed it to 16 bit and reimported it and it was OK after that.

You're welcome.