Storyline 360 - Audio disappears from timeline after edited

Apr 17, 2019

Has anyone else experienced this with Storyline 360?  It's absolutely maddening!  After I do a slight edit to a narration audio file within the audio editor, the file name will continue to show up in the timeline, although the file content disappears.  In addition, if I had a trigger set up to do something after this media completed, the trigger will often also disappear.  In addition, the audio will reappear at an unspecified period of time, so simply reinserting the audio file is not fixing this either.  I think I've got Gremlins in my Storyline 360!  Has anyone else had this problem? Here's a pic of the ghostly timeline - see how Audio 6 shows in the description - but is not there in the timeline with the other audio files.timeline

46 Replies
Mary Medlen

Members of our team have just begun experiencing these audio issues such as audio file disappearing, unable to edit the audio file and re-save, and unable to play the file. Yesterday I received a pop-up that said "Known malware was blocked," so we're working with our IT department on this aspect. 

Are others still experiencing this? If so, have you found solutions? This was the best thread I've found so far in the Community addressing our issues. Any help is appreciated.

Juan Miller

Hello, 

My colleague and I have run into the same issues. Once audio is inserted, it displays in the timeline for a short time. I even got the audio to play in the timeline once or twice, but when previewing or publishing the slide no audio plays. As soon as I touch the audio editor, it immediately disappears and says file not found. Then, SL 360 freezes and I have to CRL ALT DELETE and end the task in Task Manager. My colleague had to go back to a previous version of SL 360 to get hers to work, which I would rather not do. Help would be appreciated as this is the only thing keeping me from completing my project. 

Leslie McKerchie

Hello Todd and welcome to E-Learning Heroes :)

Thanks for contacting us and sharing that you are running into a similar issue. I took a look through the support cases that a few users worked with our team on and there is no common culprit at this time.

  • Are you working locally, typically your C: Drive, with your software, files, and audio?
  • Does this happen with all audio files and all projects or have you narrowed it down to specific items/files?

We do want to understand any underlying cause of this issue and you're welcome to work directly with our support team on this as well if needed.

Katie Riggio

Hi Colleen,

I hope this reaches you in time! 

The cause of the missing audio has been difficult for us to identify. Have you had a chance to see if rebooting help?

No worries if not, our Support team can troubleshoot in real-time while you import audio. Let us know if you could screen share with us: 

Mary Medlen

I've experienced this issue twice today. I was able to preview the audio, so I knew it was there, so I exported it, then imported it, and it worked. A possible workaround since it's less time-consuming than re-recording.

I hope this issue is being investigated and corrected. It's very random and difficult to see any patterns of occurrence.

Katie Riggio

Hello Mary and Darlesa,

I appreciate your updates on this puzzle!

While it sounds like there isn't a defined rhyme or reason for missing audio on the timeline, I found a related case where the problem stemmed from multiple audio drivers on the computer.

We'll continue to monitor similar reports and share any updates. If this issue strikes again in a new file, be sure to let us know!

Altitude Training

Hello all.

I've had this exact issue as well, with a big project (8 scenes with lots of long slides on each one), but not with specific audios. It happened with 3 entire scenes. Entire chapters with every single text-to-speech audio on those dozens of slides, are invisible.

 

This happened after I imported those 3 Scenes from another project into this big project, but they were working when I did. Only now when I got back to checking the project, a couple months later, I noticed every single audio file was missing.

 

My fix was, since I noticed when hovering the mouse over the invisible audios, the little arrow to move would show up, so I right clicked, selected "text-to-speech", to edit the text, and just added a space at the end, and clicked update. It refreshes the file and it brings back the audio.

 

You can see on the screenshots, both the issue in question, entire slides with invisible text-to-speech audios, as well as an example of the fix.

 

Hope this helps anyone still having this issue, being that we don't have a permanent solution yet.

Karen Drummey

I see this is a very old thread, but this happens to me all the time. I don't see a newer relevant thread. It's happened to me on every version of Storyline I've use, different computers, whether I work in my office or at home. I constantly get the "something went wrong message" when I work with audio. I'll even see that there is content in the timeline, but when I open it, it's blank, so I have to re-record it.

Mary Medlen

Yes, Karen, I've seen that straight, blank line on many occasions! I've learned a few things in the past couple of years:

  • Never try to record new audio into an existing audio file. Crop the end or beginning if necessary but don't mess with the file too much or at all if possible.
  • Sometimes when the audio disappears, I can click the back button to restore the audio file. However, sometimes other edits have already been made and this erases those edits.
  • I try to keep my slides at 30 seconds or less, so sometimes the fastest/easiest/least frustrating action is to just re-record.

It really is an exasperating issue that I hope Storyline continues to make a concerted effort to resolve!

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