Playback of Stereo File

There is an option in Publish - Customised Quality, where you can change the kbps of audio - not sure if that would help?

Thanks very much Jacinta. No. That;s not what I mean. The file I want to play back has two channels (left and right). When embedding the audio Articulate goes from 2 tracks (stereo) to one track (mono). It is important for my work that the two tracks stay separate.

I think that the kbps setting you are talking about changes the sampling rate of the embedded file.

Thanks again

Hi Andrew,

Are you using an audio file that meets our audio guidelines here?  If so, can you share a copy of it so that we can take a look and do some additional testing ourselves?

Hi Ashley

Thank you for your comment. The audio is an MP3 file. It plays great but has been converted from stereo (two tracks) to mono (one track). I will convert everything to WAV as suggested but my basic question is: Does Articulate play stereo embedded files? I seem to remember that somewhere I read that the file needed to be mono.

Hi Andrew,

I believe it should support stereo if you're using the file specifications I mentioned, but I've reached out to some other team members to confirm as I don't see documentation for that. I'll post back here once I have additional information to share. 

Thank you Ashley. I have not had time to convert the file from MP3 to WAV to try it out but suspect that the conversion to mono is Storyline's way of saving space. The file itself works perfectly well in its converted format - just not the way I need it for my research project.

I look forward to hearing what your colleagues have to say.

Andrew

It may be - I know Storyline likes to compress a lot of things to help with overall space issues. :-)

I'll keep you posted!

I don't believe stereo sound is possible in Storyline but would love to be proved wrong. Waiting for your reply Ashley.

Hi all,

I confirmed with our team this morning that Storyline and Studio *don't* support stereo audio. Sorry if I got your hopes up! If you insert stereo audio it'll be converted to mono once you've inserted it. At this time, it would need to be a feature request to have a different behavior. 

Thanks very much Ashley. Well... that's what I feared. Actually I figured out a workaround which is a bit time consuming but does work.

When you publish the lesson, the folder called "your_lesson_name - Storyline Output/story_content" contains the compressed audio files. These files are renamed something like 6IrO5Dp4ppN_22050_48.mp3 (or wav or...). When lessons are republished this name remains unchanged.

What you can do is to rename a copy of the original stereo file to the storyline-generated name and overwrite the compressed storyline-generated file. The file will then play in stereo.

You must do this EVERY time you recompile the lesson but if you have a folder containing all of the stereo audio files with storyline generated name, you can do the overwriting pretty fast.

Also, you must do this before you zip the files for SCORM upload or whatever.

Hope this helps - any other ideas?

Thanks a lot

Andrew

Thanks Andrew for sharing that here - great workaround! 

No it won't. It will split your file in two and give you two corrupt mono files.

Another workaround might be to insert the audio file as a web object, then Storyline will not try to reprocess the audio.

Hi Melissa,

This discussion is quite a bit older, so I'm not sure if you're running into the same issue as described earlier. 

Could you let us know what version of Storyline you're using and more detail on the issue you're running into? 

It does work, you just have to remember that if you used .wav files as your audio source in Storyline, when the project is published, these are compressed and re-encoded to .mp3, so you need to save the original stereo .wav files as stereo .mp3 files in an audio editing package such as Audacity, before renaming them to the same as the mono mp3 audio files in the 'story_content' folder. This has been tested in Storyline 3 (ver 5.3.5.16548.0)

Thanks, Chris for sharing that tip!