Continuing issues with long audio files and crashing previews

After much testing of alternative solutions, the only way to save my current working file was to recreate this complex screen from scratch, and to split out the audio into 4 separate files. Obviously long audio files should not be behaving this way in SL, but until this is addressed, if it ever is, we'll be forced to troubleshoot and find workarounds.

Hi there, Richard.  Thanks for going through that troubleshooting with your file and replying with your findings.  

I agree with you that we don't place a limit on media files.  What is the size of the entire .story file?  Do you have other long audio or other media files in the course?

Hi Crystal, 

The .story file I was working on was 35MB in size. The .story file I used to test my suppositions was about 2MB, and had just the one screen with the long audio file. 

There were a number of other long audio files, although not as long as this problem file. For the other long files that had issues during preview, adding 1-2 seconds of silence to the end of the file fixed the issue. As I mentioned, the longer the file, the more silence needed to be added to fix the issues. For the longest file, splitting it into 4 separate audio files solved that particular problem.

This issue first appeared after installing the most recent update to SL3 (I'm not using SL 360). Before the update I had never encountered this problem with long audio files.

And yes, all of the audio files are on the "C" drive.

Thanks.

Hi Richard!

Sorry to hear that you had such difficulty, but I appreciate you sharing the details.

Sounds like the issue may have been limited to a single project file? You mention using the same file in another course and it previewed fine, correct?

While it sounds like you may have gotten this course corrected, if you happen to run across this issue in the future, you can import your slides into a new course to see if that alleviates the issue.

If you feel like the latest install may have gone awry, be sure to run a quick repair.

Importing slides into a new course file seems to be the only way to avoid this issue outside of splitting narration files into several parts. However, if a course has many slides and lots of customization of the player, slide master and other items this becomes a major time/production issue. The files that have these issues were all created in SL3 previous to the last update. Once the update was applied, these courses developed this issue. I've tested this every which way and have spent a lot of time troubleshooting, and there is no other discovery I have found except that the update has caused this issue to existing courses that are being edited after the update. Brand new courses do not have this problem. Having to rebuild courses as a solution is not very efficient or a good use of time.

Hi Richard, 

I haven't yet seen other similar reports, but we're keeping an eye on it! If you'd like to share one of the problematic courses with our Support team they can also take a better look at what may have happened. 

Reach out here and let them know what troubleshooting you already started by linking to this discussion!