CHINESE COURSE TITLE - errors in published files (and how to fix them!)

Mar 31, 2020

I came across a very unsual (and problematic!) bug in Storyline 360 today.

After a lot of investigation and playing around I came across a workaround which hopefully will help others. Apologies if this has already been discussed here, but after several searches I couldnt find it mentioned.

For reference, I am using Windows 10, and Storyline 360 - version v3.36.21289.0

The problem:

I have an English course which I have completely converted to Chinese. This includes all on screen text, the player interface, buttons and lots of audio files which the course uses for VO narration)

After publishing many of the audio files are corrupted. That is, the filename is present but the file will not play.

This results in broken courses and the dreaded "spinning wheel" timer for your Learners as the LMS tries to load an audio file that is corrupt and missing.

I should add here that the entire course and all audio plays perfectly when PREVIEWing inside Storyline. The problem occurs during PUBLISHing.

The investigation:

If this happens to you, look inside your published course /story_content/ subfolder. This is where Storyline compresses and saves all your audio files. Very unhelpfully, Storyline also renames all of them so you will need to cross reference them with your originals to find ones that are missing. (I used the LENGTH and SIZE parameters in Windows Explorer to detect specific audio files, and identify ones that were corrupt.

Interestingly, it seems its not always the same files that Storyline corrupts when publishing. It appears to be a bit random although out of 50 MP3 files I had it tended to be the same 11-15 that corrupted each time. I still not sure if there is a pattern here (EDIT - audio files that were edited within the Storyline IDE possibly?)

The solution:

Remember my course was completely in Chinese? Well, that obviously included the course title as well. And because Storyline forces us to publish to a folder which will be called the same as our course title, I believe this is where the problem lies.

So, once finished your Chinese course, publish it (using a Chinese title exactly as normal)

Some of your audio files will be corrupted.

Now, change the TITLE of the course in the publish window to something English... and publish again.

Use Windows Explorer to locate both course folders, and copy the entire contents of the ENGLISH "/story_content/" subfolder into the CHINESE "/story_content/" folder.

That instantly sorted out all my audio issues, and my courses are now playing correctly again for all languages.

Hope this helps others facing the same issue.

1 Reply
Andrew Hanley

A little further update on this...

If you have Javascript triggers, it seems copying all the files in the "/story_content/" folder from one course to another one will break the JS from firing.

No idea why as they should be identical.

So best just to copy the audio/video files you need and leave the rest intact.

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