Recording Multi-Track Audio in Storyline

Hi Andrew,

This is interesting. As far as I know, Storyline can only play one audio track at a time.

Can you help me understand your course design a little more? Are you needing both of your voices captured on one slide (or within one simulation)? If you are trying to record more of a conversation style with both of your voices on a single slide, you can mix both tracks and save as one audio file using the free tool Audacity. Here is a community thread with several tutorials included.

Now if you need to record the two of you talking at the same time and it's capturing the recording with one person remote that is the challenge, pulling the audio from a recorded video conference may be a good way to go.There are some folks really talented with audio and voiceover in this community. If you can give us a little more detail of what you're trying to do we might be able to find a good solution for you.

Cheers!

Natalia

Hey Natalia -- it's definitely more the former. I'm recording some software simulations. The expert is in a different city, so I want to capture our unscripted conversation, while simultaneously clicking through a software program and recording the video in Storyline. 

My question is: can you do that all in one go? Because it would be a huge headache to have to record the audio separately from the video, no matter which way you slice it. 

It sounds like the trick will be just how to record the video and capture you both at once. I don't think you can use Storyline as the recording tool for that but if you use something else to record, like you would record any video conference, you can import that complete video file into Storyline. I've done that using MS Lync before. It's not a slick video but Storyline imports and plays it without any problem.

A video conferencing system is definitely the path of least resistance, although in my experience the audio quality suffers a great deal. Here are a couple of options I have used:

1. I have made the conference call on my cell phone and use an 1/8" splitter to split the audio out put in two directions. Once side I use my standard head set so I can have a conversation, the other end I use a patch cable to to the microphone in on my PC.
2. The other option I have used to ship the SME a good quality audio record or lavaliere mic. Have the record the audio. They can email you the resulting files and ship the recorder back. See the attached pic or the rig I use. It has worked well for me, but is by no means quick and easy.

One more thought. While you can not record multiple tracks in storyline at the same time. You can import multiple files to the same slide and line them up.

Jonathon,

Will they play simultaneously?

I just did this in a software simulation course in Storyline for a client.  The SME recorded audio in Audacity ahead of time (as he was performing the actions on screen) and sent me .WAV files.  I then used a separate laptop to play back the SME's audio files. 

I then, after playing the SME's file a few times to get the cadence and all, and rehearsing the screen movements, recorded the screencast with Storyline on my desktop silently with the SME's vocal track playing on the laptop.  I then matched the SMEs vocal track to my screencast.  If I needed more time, I add seconds of silence at various times in the Storyline audio editor.

Worked really, really  good . . .

For an unscripted conversation at a distance, you might try hooking up through Skype and using Audio Hijack Pro to record or redirect the audio as an internal source. This might enable you to use the Skype conversation as an audio source while recording your captures. It works really well. Brian Dusablon used this to record the Toolbar podcast.

I haven't tried this using Storyline but I imagine it could work pretty well with the added benefit of broadcasting the screen as it is being captured to your remote SME.

Hmm... Audio Hijack Pro might be Mac only. Looks like there's an alternative for PC called Total Recorder.

Natalia, to answer your question about simultaneous playback -- Yep! It will. I've used this to line up sound tracks and coordinate exchanges between characters. On some versions of iOS you are likely to run into problems. But it'll work fine on the desktop.