Changing Speed of Audio in Articulate Storyline?

Nov 20, 2013

I'm working on creating some Articulate Storyline projects for a class I teach.  Our current videos are MUCH less engaging and interactive and are simply the professor in front of a web camera lecturing.  One things students LOVE to do is to speed up the audio / presentation of the video.  Most students can listen and absorb items much faster than we can talk about them.  I have some audio/lecturing slides in Storyline (e.g. when I do a voice-over of a screen capture or talk about the basics of financial statements).  I'm wondering if there is anything I can add to the player that would allow students to control the speed of the audio.

Pinned Reply
Eric Santos

Hi, everyone!

I have some great news to share. We just released another update for Storyline 360. In Update 83, we've included important fixes and new features!

One of the new features we've included:

Launch the Articulate 360 desktop app on your computer to take advantage of this update, and click the Update button next to Storyline 360. You'll find our step-by-step instructions here.

Please let me know if you need additional help!

167 Replies
Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard

Hi Janet and welcome to Heroes! 

There isn't anything I can think of that added to the player would allow the student to speed up the audio/video - the seekbar will allow them to scrub through the audio/video but they'd miss elements of it. The community always amazes me with what they come up with though, so I hope that someone is able to assist you here.

Ian Ivey

This issue continues to increase in importance. The learner's ability to increase playback / progress speed in the player is an option we need to see added to Storyline in the near future. Editing the video before publishing (i.e., forcing the user into a specific playback speed) is not sufficient.

Many learners today want to be able to control that audio speed. This is a central issue to the concept of "self-paced" learning -- it's not a trivial matter.

Crystal Horn

Hi there, Ian.  Thanks for your thoughts.  Can you share your perspective in a feature request?  If you do, tell us a little more about specific use case where learners need to speed up or slow down audio.  Is it narration that learners need to speed up?  Is the seekbar on the player not a good solution for scrubbing through the timeline?

Thanks again for taking the time to share!

Shireen Lakhani

I haven't had the chance to see if this will work in Storyline, but can javascript be used for the same purpose as shown here for Captivate? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSgwS7DeMKo

Although this is only a solution for embedded videos and not the module itself. I'd like the player to have playback speed options. That would be an awesome feature.

 

Susan Bedsaul

This is a huge feature that needs to be included in Articulate 360.  I hear this from potential clients every week regarding our online training.  To such an extent, I have spent time looking for alternative software solutions.  Not anxious to re-train in something different, but definitely want to convey the importance of Articulate to incorporate the ability to increase audio playback speed.

Concetta Phillipps

Another vote for this. Our learners have been asking about the ability to change audio speed. We can't assume learners all hear and process the audio at the same speed, so some folks need it slower and some need it faster. Very important.

Its become so much more prevalent since most of the major podcast and audio apps on Android and iPhone have this ability. 

Concetta Phillipps

The seekbar is a good way to FIND a specific piece of audio. Its not good if you want to speed up the overall audio itself. To use an analogy - I look at using the seekbar like skipping a track on a CD. But I can't play the music track itself at 2x speed (so everyone sounds like Chipmunks, lol). 

Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard

Thanks, Susan and Concetta for sharing how this is impacting you and your course design. I know a few of the earlier folks in this discussion mentioned specifically needing more options when using our Text to Speech tools, it sounds like you're like this for any audio you import into Storyline too? 

Susan Bedsaul

Yes, we need the ability to increase audio speed on audio clips that we add into Articulate Storyline. We have professional narration that we incorporate into our training. While we are not currently using text-to-speech, I can definitely see the need there as well. The ability to increase speed is used significantly in education settings and to re-state my original post, we are being asked about this feature every week. I would love to hear back when we might expect to see this feature released. Thank you!

Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard

Thanks, Susan - it's really valuable insight. I'm not able to offer an ETA for this feature, but I've passed along the ideas here to our team. Our team uses the information here to help assess what features should be included in future updates and we'll keep you posted if this one is included in Storyline! 

Leslie McKerchie

Hi Yuyen,

Thank you for submitting a feature request and sharing your use-case/need for this.

We do not have a voting system, but we do tag conversations in the forums and feature requests for our team so that we can track users requesting as well as an update when we can.

I wanted to share some information about how we manage these feature requests as that may be helpful. 

This thread is already attached and I'll be sure to add your request to the report as well :)