Storyline 360 - Poor Audio Output and Crashing

Feb 03, 2018

I am using the publish to video of Storyline 360 Desktop App and having lots of trouble.

Fist, the audio quality is poor. I use high-quality audio narration (uncompressed .WAV, 44.4KhZ, 1058 bit rate). The audio sounds perfect when exported to eLearning.

However, when I export to Video (1080p, Video Quality "Very high" and Audio Quality "Very High"), the audio is severely degraded and sounds "tinny."

I wanted to produce DVDs for use in the classroom, but it sounds poor and amateurish. 

Second, when I attempt to publish a "long" video, 52-minutes, the video portion works, but the application crashes when incorporating the audio track. Storyline does output a file, but it is pure video with no sound at all.

When I output smaller snippets, the total video is published, but with the audio problems mentioned in the start of this thread.

Publishing to 720p has identical results.

Thoughts, suggestions, workarounds?

 

System Information:

Windows 10 Pro, 64-bit, Version 1709, Build 16299.192

Quad-core, i7, 3.5GHz

RAM: 32 GB

Storyline version: 3.12.14647.0

66 Replies
Leslie McKerchie

Hi Mark,

We did have a user share the following workaround that worked for them:

  • Changed publish output to Articulate 360 to test if audio quality also reduced there. I then noticed in Properties>Quality settings the audio bitrate was set to 16kpbs. Changed to 128kpbs.
  • Published to Articulate 360. Audio fine.
  • Changed publish output back to Video>Audio Quality = Very High and audio quality was improved in final render.
  • My conclusion: The audio quality in the Video publish is dependent on the audio quality properties setting from the other publish options (360, Web, LMS)?

Hi Kika,

You are welcome to try the above steps shared by a fellow community member and let us know if that works for you as well.

To All,

If anyone has a course that they would like to share with our team (and has not done so already) as we continue to investigate, that would be very helpful. Please feel free to share it here.

I wanted to share some information on how we define bugs and how we tackle them when they occur as well.

Mark Hahm

Leslie,

I attempted the suggested workaround using the steps provided, but the audio quality in the video publish did not improve.

What's puzzling is the audio bitrate, which is quantified in the A 360, Web, A Online, LMS & CD publish windows, is not quantified in the video publish. There, the highest option is "Very High", but I have no idea what the exact audio bitrate number is for publishing.   

Leslie McKerchie

It was worth a shot Mark. Thanks for the update.

I did a little digging to see if I could find some information out on the bitrate, but my results are inconclusive at this time. We have a bug filed for specifically for the audio quality of a published video file and the slider does not seem to do anything at this time.

This thread is attached so that we can update you here when we can.

I'm sorry if this is holding up your development. 

Sam Hammond

Hi Mark, in order to determine the actual output quality, you'd have to analyze the video file details after the fact in a media player like VLC. I think Windows File Explorer also provides those file details. 

It's been over five months since this issue was reported, but it sounds like the quality issue is still a problem in that regardless of what "qualitative" setting you choose, the output quality actually remains the same (and quite low, to boot). 

What we did as a workaround was publish out as .mp4 with the low quality audio, then open the video up in Premiere. In Premiere, we added the high-quality audio back in as a separate track, synced up with the low-quality audio. Then we just muted the low-quality track and published the output. 

Crystal Horn

Hey everybody. I'm excited to let you know that we just released update 17 for Storyline 360! It includes new features and fixes - check them all out here.

One of the fixes addresses an issue where the audio quality of published videos was not as good as when previewed.

Here’s how you can update Storyline 360 to take advantage of everything the latest release has to offer. Let me know how you make out!

Thach Nguyen

Hi Leslie

Sorry I was mistaken about it taking forever it appears that have arrow shapes that are pointing down causes the slide to crash which stopped the encoding from progressing and getting stuck on the slide. I have solved that by using lines instead of arrows but the video option is still just using the lowest possible sound quality.

Kika Diama

I also downloaded the new update Crystal mentioned, but there was no change in audio quality when publishing to video.  I looked at the update release notes from the push from last Friday, but it doesn't seem like anything was pushed out to resolve video output quality.  Is that issue still being considered a bug and being worked on?

Mark Hahm

I updated AS 360 as well yesterday.  No improvement in the audio quality when publishing it as a video. I cannot understand why this issue hasn't been resolved yet.  I think the audio publish settings need to be similar to the other publish settings where the audio frame rates can be set quantitatively (128 kbps) rather than qualitatively (very high).    

Like Sam had mentioned, the best workaround option is to utilize a video editor.  I am using Camtasia.  Once I import the published video into the Camtasia timeline, I split the audio from the video, inserted a new audio track with recordings to line up with the Articulate Storyline audio, and then delete the Storyline audio completely.

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