HELP!!! Can't hear audio?!

Jan 15, 2014

My audio (recorded from mic) is playing perfectly when I preview it from the Sound Tools and from the Timeline.

But, I can't hear anything when I preview the slides/project.

I'm on a major deadline!  Help!

Everything is plugged in and none of my volume controls are down or muted

9 Replies
Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard

Hi Carmen, 

It sounds like odd behavior, so I'd suggest to first check the following:

  • Work on your local drive (your C: drive).Working on a network drive or a USB drive can cause erratic behavior, includingfile corruption, loss of audio, and other unexpected behavior. 
  • You should also make sure the directory pathto your project files and your published output is less than 260 characters(for example C:\Articulate).
  • Avoid using special characters, accents orsymbols in your file names.

Additionally, how have you set up the audio files to play? Based on a trigger or automatically? You may want to check that all those are set up correctly. 

If you're still experiencing some odd behavior, are you able to share your .story file with us here? If not, you can also send it along to me here and please include at the beginning of the description the following syntax if you'd like the files to come to be directly:

::ashley::

Then we'll be able to test your files and see if there is anything else happening. 

Maxine Wesley

I have a similar problem.  I have one MP3 file that I want to insert as an audio file into a slide in Storyline 2.  When I preview it I can hear the background music but not the speaker talking.  Normally I use Storyline projects over my network so I moved it and tried it again on my C: drive.  Still no luck.  I thought maybe it was my project so I created a new project and saved it to my C: drive.  It had one slide with one audio file and it still didn't work.  I split the audio into one file for the background music and one file for the speaker talking.  I could hear the background music but I still couldn't hear the speaker talking!  I had previously updated my Storyline to Update 5 and then rolled it back to the previous update because it corrupted my Storyline file.  So I thought maybe it's my Storyline software that is corrupt and I tried it on a test laptop that had been updated - still no luck!

Weird!  If anyone has any solutions I'd be grateful to hear them!

Thanks,

Vicki.

Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard

Hi Vicki,

First off, I did want to mention that working off a network drive is known to cause issues as described here, so you'll want to look at ensuring you're working locally. 

You mentioned "background music" and Storyline doesn't have a background music/playlist feature like that included in Presenter - so I'm unsure how you've set up these two audio tracks. Are they both on the same slide or are you inserting one as a audio file on a master slide? I think we'd need to take a look at how these two audio files are set up to play on the slide - can you share a sample .story file here?

Also, you mentioned you thought the software was corrupt, so I'd look at repairing Storyline as described here. 

Maxine Wesley

Hi Ashley,

Sorry, I didn't make that very clear.  I have one MP3 file that has some music on it and a person speaking over the top of the music.  When I put the file into Storyline is seems to play the file and I can hear the music but I can't hear the person speaking.  I've attached the storyline and the audio file to this post.  Hopefully you can help!  I can add other MP3 files and they work okay, I just don't know why this one isn't working.

Thanks,

Vicki.

Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard

Thanks Vicki for sharing the file and the MP3 file here as well. I tested it in Storyline 1 and 2 - and both times I don't hear the presenter speaking - but it does seem to work in Replay and Presenter '13.  Although Storyline and Studio support a wide range of audio file formats (AAC, AIF, AIFF, M4A, MP3, OGG, WAV, WMA), not all codecs and bitrates are supported. Since this one seems to have some odd behavior - you may want to look at converting your audio files to 16 bit 44 KHZ PCM WAV for better results. 

Let us know if you're able to convert the audio file and then successfully import into Storyline. 

Maxine Wesley

Hi Ashley,

Thanks for that.  Luckily my colleague is quite knowledgeable when it comes to audio so I let him have a look too.  Here's what he found:

"Seems to be that the audio that had come from the camera (voice) was  in a 5.1 format rather than stereo or mono. To solve this I opened the file in adobe audition, selected all the audio, edit > extract channels to mono files. Then saved the file as a .wav/.mp3 44100 hz MONO 32bit and it worked. "

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