How do you play a single song as background music?

Oh, I thought since you can do it in Presenter you could do it in Storyline. That is a little disappointing.

Thanks for the post. I was trying to figure it out as well.

Hmmm, I wonder if adding this to story.html (after publishing) would work :

How and where would you add this? I was thinking of cutting the music for each slide or just play the same short song for each slide. I'm basically trying to use Storyline to create Prezi time animated presentation. This is a pet project that I work on when I'm not busy. I just got handed three courses to complete by the end of the month so I can't work on this now. I hope to hear other ideas on how to accomplish this from the staff.

Hi Marty,

This is the html5 tag for playing audio files without any player controls. Adding this line to story.html and story_html5.html right before the closing BODY tag would play the audio file named "sound.mp3".

Agreed, this is outside the scope and purpose of Storyline, but if you really want to have background music the whole way, you'd probably have to use this "hack", or something similar anyway.

Have a look at the simplest of implementations here.

Note : Webkit & IE9+ only at this point (but it can be made to work with all major browsers if you convert your audio to .OGG as well).

I'll try to create a better version of this soon, and share the code with you here.

Hope it helps,
Alex

Sorry to bump this up,

I inserted background audio to a demo I am working on which contains other sound effects in storyline and it now works with Firefox as well (still no Opera since it only handles WAV audio).

And that's that...

I hope it works for you Martin and Marty.

Cheers,

Alex

I found this post and tried it out and can't thank you enough. It totally worked!! Thanks. I love this community.

Awesome about to try it out....thanks for explaining in detail, much appreciated.

Thanks Alexandros.

I'm glad this works for everyone...

Now if only there was a way to integrate this to the main Player volume control - wishful thinking, I know...

Is there a way to add some code, so when the user pauses the project the music won't keep playing?

Hi

I wonder if somoene can help i dont know where i wouild put any ode to do this, i dont know Java or HTML i need one song to loop through the whole project but i know nothing about writing code.

Hi Rachel,

I "...could not write code..." until about 3 weeks ago when needed to for another solution.

What you need to do is:

1> Compile your course.

2> Find the output files as mentioned by Alexandros, and use Wordpad to edit them as explained. Do not think of it as "code" - just think of it as a normal document filled with strange stuff

You do not need to know the code - just follow the instructions - you will be fine.

Have a play with a test file to get the hang of it first before doing a "real" course. It's only the output files you are playing with, so if it all goes pear-shaped you have not destroyed anything, (but I always use a test file or copy of original until it works - just to be sure!)

Let us know how it goes.

Bruce

@Meghan

In this case, I'm afraid you're pretty much "married" to the music as is. It is possible to show a different html5 player under or over the Articulate Player, but that looks both redundant and half-baked. Having said that, I can post the code if you're interested.

@Rachel,

Bruce is right, however I totally get how you feel, as it may seem a little daunting the first time you try to fiddle with the very concept Storyline tries to save you from. Unfortunately I have been unable to find a more reliable and convenient way to achieve this, so far. 

I will try to make some time tomorrow to create a short screencast that clearly describes the whole "process".

Alex

Update :

I have now managed to merge the background music volume to the stock players Volume Button, but it works in HTML5 only. If only i could get an acceptable ID for Flash... :(

Anyway, here is the modified code :

Instructions : You need only change 'story.html' by inserting " id='control-volume' " as shown in the pic.

Hope this helps (albeit just a little more),
Alex

Very cool. Thanks Alex!

This post has come along way. I ended up playing music in the first and last slide. Great work Alex! I think I can do this. I'm not intimidated by the code. I have worked with HTML a little and there is plenty of instructions online. 

The project marketing piece that inspired my original post has been well received in my organization.  I think I will try to add the music to the project now that I know how. I wanted music to play in the background and under the voiceover for whole piece. Now I can do this.

I applied this fix, but it did not work.

I found if i open story.html in IE9, the music does not play.

But if I Open > With "Google Chrome", the music does play.

Does anyone have any ideas?

The music is WAV format, I have also tried converting the music to OGG, but get the same results.

Thanks

Rachel

Yup...Welcome to the (non-existent) world of cross browser compatibility... One can't help but dream...

What you are getting is to be expected. IE9 does not support WAV audio (only MP3 and AAC). Once you convert to MP3, it will work there as well.

To sum this up :

MP3 for Chrome, Safari, IE9 and above
OGG for Firefox
WAV for Opera

Hope this helps,
Alex

Hello,

I tried this fix, and it worked when I played the story.html file from my desktop. But when I moved the scorm package to the FTP and imported it into my LMS the audio won't play.

Is there anything I'm missing?

Thanks,

Alison

Hi Alison,

I haven't tested this against LMS output so far.

However, please have a look inside your zipped SCORM package. I don't think SL includes the audio files when zipping the package, even if it's already in your root. However, you can insert it through your zip application.

Once that's done, you may also have to check if the audio files do indeed get extracted with the rest of the course in your LMS. If not, that means you may need to edit your imsmanifest.xml and include those files ( under <resources> ).

Let us know how it goes,
Alex

Hi All,

I tried this solution and could not get it to work at all. I do not really know HTML so can't figure out what I am doing wrong. Is there anywhere I can find a step-by-step process for doing this? The posts above aren't completely clear on exactly what code to add (there are several different ones within this thread) or where to add the actual audio files. I added them to the "Story Content" but that didn't seem to work. 

Grr... I hate being a newbie!

Shannon

Alex,

This is good! But i was thinking, can we give a control to the user to stop the background score? Because the volume button in Storyline would control only the sounds added to the slides and not to the background.

Suggestions would be helpful!

Thanks,

Ajay

This is an awesome and very helpful thread on this topic.  Thank you to Alexandros for all of your work on this, and everyone else for posting their experiences and methods!

I would also like to know where to put the audio files as the poster above has asked?