Storyline is clipping off the first couple seconds of voice over recordings

May 23, 2022

Hi there - 

Recently, Storyline started playing my voice overs a second or two late. So for example, instead of "Select Add/Edit under the Ship From banner," we hear "Add/Edit under the Ship From banner." It plays this way when I'm editing, in the Preview, and on Review, but not in the original recording. I've polled my coworkers (who reviewed in  Review 360), and it didn't happen for them, so I'm thinking it will be okay when I publish it, but in the meantime, it's kind of driving me crazy. 

Is there a setting in Storyline that might be making this happen? 

5 Replies
Andrea Koehntop

Hi Lerissa & Francois!

I apologize for your issues with Storyline cutting off the first seconds of your voice-over.

Lerissa, as a clarifying question: are you saying it plays normally in preview and review, but not in the original Storyline file?

I've tried this on my end, and the voice-over worked as expected in Storyline 360 on the latest update. 

Is this happening with one particular file, or every file where you try to create a voice-over in Storyline?

You could add a second or two of silence to the beginning of your audio to allow for the entire voice-over to be read.

To do that:

  1. Select your audio.
  2. Go to "Edit Audio." 
  3. Select the beginning of the audio, and add a second or two of silence. Save and close. 

Please let me know if that helps, or if you need additional assistance! 

Scott Wiley

Based on a similar experience, although it was recording audio into PowerPoint, I'm wondering if it might be caused by your microphone?

Some noise-cancelling features, or perhaps Wi-fi issues, can cause audio to do a kind of "ramp up" to full volume. Even leaving a couple of seconds of silence won't solve this as it starts the ramp up once some audio is being sensed.

Maybe start by saying a word or two that you know will be deleted off the front end. Something like "delete this line" should work.

Hope that helps.

Lerissa Patrick

Hi there Scott and Andrea: 

So, to Andrea's questions: 

  • It plays normally in the original audio file in Audacity
  • The problem occurs when it plays in anything Storyline - in edit mode, in preview mode, and in Review (but in Review, ONLY on my computer) (weird, I know)
  • I've tried adding silence to the beginning - no dice

I'm using an AKG professional mic and Audacity, so I doubt there is an issue there (especially since I've recorded lots of V.O.s with that setup that also play normally everywhere else) (although I haven't tried importing them into Storyline to see what they would do). 

The idea of providing a throwaway phrase at the beginning is interesting, but ... this is for a narrated software demo; so each instruction/explanation to the user is separated from the previous one by two to three seconds or more, so I would have to insert "delete this" in front of each phrase/instruction/explanation and there are 10 to 20 of them on average, per demo.

I am pretty sure this did not happen before. It seems like it's a fairly recent phenom, starting some time after I started working on this course last December. I'm trying to think of what changed on my computer that might cause this. 

In the end, it truly seems to be happening only on my computer, so as long as it plays right when published, it doesn't matter. It's just ... annoying. :-) 

Thanks, all! 

Lerissa