Changing Speed of Audio in Articulate Storyline?

Nov 20, 2013

Janet Samuels
By Janet Samuels

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
4 months ago12/13/23 at 3:53 pm (UTC)

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
Kevin Perry
over 4 years ago10/25/19 at 4:25 pm (UTC)

I've just started with Storyline, and am pretty surprised that this isn't a feature that's been implemented yet. A dozen of my users (out of ~100) have asked for this - both non-native language speakers, who might need things a little slower, and people who want to move at a faster pace.
When YouTube has had a feature for years, my team is going to ask for it pretty vociferously.

Fraser Gordon
over 4 years ago10/29/19 at 2:18 pm (UTC)

I see in your upcoming release that an accessible player will be coming soon. Can someone confirm whether or not this accessible player will allow changes to playback speed? We actually need this player feature partially to support accessibility, so if it is part of that release, that would be greatly helpful!

Ren Gomez
over 4 years ago10/29/19 at 8:59 pm (UTC)

Hi Fraser,

Thanks for reaching out! This discussion contains some of the details around the accessibility player and in what stages we're addressing our efforts on. Media playback is in the conversation, and I'd be happy to share your thoughts with our team around playback speed.

Also, if you interested and would like to contribute your ideas more personally, feel free to take a look and reach out if you'd like to participate in the beta program!

Rodrigo Filipe
over 4 years ago12/10/19 at 8:18 am (UTC)

Hi Ren,

It's great to hear that you guys are taking seriously the request, expressed by many here, to add functionality to control the speed of audio and video. I have made my request almost 1 year ago but I can see that the first suggestion was made 6 years ago. It's about time to show some respect for the customers who patiently wait for the functionality and keep loyal to Storyline. 

From my perspective, I would expect Articulate to provide this in two places:
1. For the audio in the narration of the slides;
2. For the videos we embed on the slides.

If I may suggest, I think you should try to implement something similar to the most used, YouTube. This will make it easier for our learners to adapt to the new features intuitively because they already know them.

Please keep us posted on the developments.

Regards
Rodrigo

 

Your Accredited Training Provider
4 years ago02/05/20 at 6:20 am (UTC)

Good morning, over the past few months we have shared our free modules with many international experts for their comments on our modules and most of them commented that the audio voice is much to fast.  So yes, this is really something that will be beneficial to all who listens to the voice in an e-learning module.  Please keep me updated if such a function has been found and is working so that we may correct all of our audio files accordingly.

OWEN HOLT
4 years ago03/11/20 at 3:37 pm (UTC)

You could probably use javascript to find the <audio> tag. 

//this line of code will return an array of all audio tags on the HTML page
var x = document.getElementsByTagName('audio');

In theory, the page probably will only have one tag so your audio should be the first item in the array. You can now assign the audio an id.

//this line of code assigns an ID to the first element in the audio array
x[0].id='testAudio';

Now that you have an ID, you can find the audio by ID at anytime and manipulate the playback rate.

//this code speeds up playback to 125% speed
testAudio.playbackRate=1.25;

//this code cuts the playback speed to 50%
testAudio.playbackRate=.50;

Cara Simone
4 years ago03/11/20 at 4:28 pm (UTC)

Lol.

Cara
Cara Simone, [she/her] Why include pronouns?

Manager of Curricular Design and Delivery
Office of Medical Student Education
Larner College of Medicine
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Larner Active Learning Website

"I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand."
-Confucius

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Fraser Gordon
4 years ago03/23/20 at 6:20 pm (UTC)

Bumping the conversation again, because I got more feedback around the lack of playback speed control from one of our users. Because YouTube and other popular video systems support this natively, the lack of playback speed support is very obvious to the average user, and is leading to a negative user experience. As mentioned before, it has great accessibility benefits as well, which is why I was surprised it was not included in the previous accessibility update.

Looking back to the start of this thread, I see this issue has been mentioned and brought up many times over the last 6 years. Is there any chance the priority of this can be raised by development teams? A custom JavaScript solution is more fragile, and sub-optimal for our purposes, as compared to an official Articulate implementation of this support.

Naku KULKARNI
4 years ago03/23/20 at 10:17 pm (UTC)

I hope this feature is built in the next update.

I used following code in my execute javascript trigger and works fine.

var myAudio = document.getElementsByTagName("audio")[0];

myAudio.playbackRate = .5; // Change this value to 2 for double speed.

The problem here is you can not sync any animation with this audio. When the audio speed changes, the timeline remains same. Having said that, if you have any static image on the slide and audio associated to it, then only use this code.

Thanks

 

Your Accredited Training Provider
almost 4 years ago07/02/20 at 5:36 am (UTC)

Morning Articulate Team,

The below matter has been escalated for a very long time however there seems to be no progress on this matter.
Can you please send feedback on where you are with this functionality?

Trusting the above to be in order.
Kind Regards
Estee Tyler
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