Forum Discussion
Audio over multiple slides in Storyline
I know that in Articulate Storyline you have to break up your audio by slide. I have some music I'd like to play over multiple slides. When I break up the music by slide though there seems to be a half second delay between slides which makes the music sound choppy, Is there any fix for this? I welcome any and all ideas 
Hi everyone!
I have some great news to share. We just released another update for Storyline 360. In Update 74, we've included important fixes and new features.
One of the new features we've included is:
- Create immersive experiences with continuous background audio that sets the tone and keeps learners engaged.
Launch the Articulate 360 desktop app on your computer to take advantage of this update, and click the Update button next to Storyline 360. You'll find our step-by-step instructions here.
Please let me know if you have questions!
The way i do this ( not only for audio, but also continuously animated backgrounds and video ) is preparing 2 separate Storyline files.
- 1) bg.story. your background file..a 1 page file with seamless audio, video or animations
-2) slides.story. Your actual storyline slides with several pages..
-3) publish your slides.story to html when ready
-4) import your published html as webobject into the bg.story
now you have seamless background audio or video, with a nice flexible setup
Hi Math,
I am trying your steps and have a question, what is the "web address" that I would enter in the web object screen?
Here is what I did that didn't work: I published slides file, then right-clicked on published slides html file and selected open with Internet Explorer. Next, I copied that web address and inserted it into the web object and when I test link it stated to enter a valid web address.
The web address I entered was just the folder path. Do I need to publish the file into our LMS then use that web address?
Thanks,
Dana
Hi, thanks for the suggestion, I tried this with a 3-scene .story, ended up with a 4th scene with music and none on the other scenes. Don't know what I did wrong!
Thanks for checking in, Elizabeth! While there isn't a feature for adding audio over multiple slides, we do realize it's a popular request! If we add this feature to Storyline in the future, we'll be sure to share the news with you.
You can keep up with all the new and exciting things we're adding to Storyline on our What's New page!
Hi Alyssa Gomez, I spent the last couple of days + overtime working on this problem. The issue is that most of the javascripts/html solutions suggested here works beautifully on the PC and Android but not on the iPhone. According to https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/wa-ioshtml5/ the iOS allows only a single audio at a time. And the volume cannot be controled from Javascript. In my testing I can get Javascript initiated from a lightbox but not inside an active slide with other audio activities :(. This seems like a problem with Apple ... not something that Articulate can fix easily. At any rate ... I got the best result by (1) using short looping audio in all slides (2) Using sox (Ubuntu) to normalize all *.wav and *.mp3 audios and ffmpeg (+sox) to normalize all audios in mp4 files. (3) Then use so to to generate a normalized - 18dB versions for the background sound.
One of the cool things about this setup, you can control the audio (starts, stops, volume, loads) through a JavaScript trigger.
If you're able to place the js library files somewhere central (yourURL.com/js/soundmanager.js) you can add the JS include line to every publish by editing your player template (in Storyline's install directory). Once you've done this you don't need to do any surgery after publish. Everything can be added / done through JavaScript, provided you've added your media files to the package or can reference them somehow.
I've had some luck adding media files to the resources before publish. Files retain their name under story_content/external_files.
It would be great if this were built into the program. I have not tried the work around suggested by Steve yet but from what I am reading it sounds complicated.
Since any of you might think this is helpful, I will add that I created each of my "segments" or "scenes" on its own slide, grouped the elements and then moved the group to the 'main' slide. Then I deleted my development slide.
This helped me stay sane. Must label/name groups and use the 'show/hide' function a LOT!
Hey Shelby!
Have you seen this little gem shared by Emily here?
Hi Cristina! Welcome to the community. 😊 While there still isn't a way to add audio over multiple slides, we do realize it's a popular request! If we add this feature to Storyline in the future, we'll be sure to share the news here.
You can keep up with all the new and exciting things we're adding to Storyline on our What's New page!
Thank you!
Cristina Emberton
eLearning Specialist
Family & Consumer Sciences
109 McCord Hall, 2620 Morgan Circle Dr.
Knoxville, TN 37996865-974-9980 Office
cemberto@utk.edu | ag.tennessee.edu/fcs
Hi Andrew,
Thanks for letting us know that you're anticipating this feature.
I'm not sure which solution you took a look at, but it sounds like the use of different slide masters may work for the set-up you would like to see.
As I mentioned above, this feature was prioritized internally based on user feedback. I do not have a roadmap, but we will notify you here when we have information to share.
Hi Jeff,
I appreciate you letting us know your thoughts and how you would use this feature as well. Thanks for sharing your idea too.
It looks like your email signature came through when you replied via email. You can remove that if needed by clicking ‘Edit’ beneath your response. Here’s a quick Peek video if you need help.
You'd need to leverage something at the HTML level to make this happen but this API could be helpful. Might be complicated if you're not comfortable with JS and HTML:
Thank you so much, Steve! I am very comfortable coding JavaScript and HTML so I think this option should work
