Audio Delay When Published But Not When Previewed

Hi Kelly - thank you for the response and troubleshooting tips.  All slides in the project have audio, and all the triggers for the problem slide are set identically to the other slides that have layers.  The only difference that I can determine is that the slides that are working fine have more layers that the one with the issue.  I will try the new .story file option to see if that works and I'll also publish to Review as a test both before and after for comparison.  I'll let you know if it works or not.

I am experiencing this issue for the first time in six years of using Storyline. In the timeline view, the audio is in perfect sync, but as soon as I try to preview it in the browser, there is a delay in the audio only.  I haven't even gotten to the point of publishing into Review 360 or the LMS yet.  Additionally, it is only happening on one slide in the project.  I recreated a new version of the same slide, created a different audio track and the same issue occurred.  Another troubleshooting point - this slide has layers.  When I created the new version, the audio played fine in the preview with no delay, but after I added in the layers, the delay occurred again.  This is not the only slide with layers in this project, though.  Unfortunately, there is proprietary information in my project, so I can't upload it to have the developers look at it.  Can you recommend any other actions to try?

This happens intermittently in my projects and has for years. It seems like the default behavior is for a slide to start playing as soon as it downloads the base visuals on the slide, even if it isn't done downloading the audio or other heavy elements. For people with slow connections, this can result in the slide being mistimed (obviously, in the case of animations and such that are based on audio timing, or when there are different pieces of audio in sequence and they start overlapping each other because the first one is delayed).

It would be nice if there was a toggle to tell the presentations not to start playing a slide until all elements are downloaded. I'd rather the learner sees a loading bar moving between slides rather than it seeming to load quickly, but then having obvious timing issues.

I am experiencing the same issue, even when I am previewing a slide from my local drive, not even published in Review or in a LMS. How can you explain this delay when I am working localy?

I suppose in typical Articulate fashion there is still no resolution to this after 2 years. Just send in your project, we'll take a look, and you'll never see anymore about it? Excuse my frustration, but this problem has been a thorn in me for much longer than 2 years. It's frustrating to precisely synchronize visual and audio elements only to see them play unsynchronized. It reflects badly on the developer, making them look careless and sloppy. It's worst when playing from Articulate 360, but seems to also happen when playing from a local drive, though not as pronounced. The only thing that helps is to let course play for several seconds, and then scrub the play head back to the beginning to start again. But asking the viewer to do that is unreasonable. Seems like adding an adjustable buffering function might be worth trying. 

I have solved this on my eLearning's. When you do screen recordings as you know it creates a long video of your workflows and there is a small video on each slides timeline. Once I have the screenshot I want through fine action tuning for that slide I delete the video from the timeline essentially reducing them all to screenshots. This takes the video load off the project and it works smoothly without delay. 

So the resolution for me boiled down to going into each slide of the project and deleting the screen recordings at the slide level. This fixed the audio lag. 

I have a case open and we determined the sound works in Firefox but not in chrome and edge. I've asked that Articulate review and compare the developer code screenshots of the success vs failed to see why. Still waiting. Fingers crossed. 

No resolution here. I haven't had time to open a case and share a specific course file, although it appears others have. Given how widespread the issue seems to be, I'm hopeful Articulate will test and resolve. Clearing browser cache is not a suitable solution for us - I want our employees to be able to view courses without having to provide manual intervention. 

Have any of you solved this? It's now happening in 2 of my courses. I have a case open but I wonder if anyone with previous cases has solved this issue.