Audio won't load

We had this exact same problem - i think - and it happened  multiple times on three different machines.

Here is what we found: After sitting open for an extended period of time - like overnight - a storyline file would encounter problems when returning to the file and starting to do something.  Apparently the file had become corrupted while sitting there.  If the file was saved, the corrupted state would get saved.  It appeared to us that the audio files were gone.  The slide still said that it existed, and that loading thing you see is the program trying to load something that isn't there anymore.  But the info was gone, and the evidence for that was that the file size was suddenly drastically smaller.  We had this happen with all recordings in a story along with many of the pictures in the story.  Other times it would only be some of the audio files and some of the pictures.

Luckily for us, we keep the files on DropBox and we can easily roll back to an older version.  I know that seems to be frowned upon, but it has saved our skins several times.  I don't think that is causing the problem, as we had the same problem with keeping files on our local drives before we started saving them in Dropbox.

We have learned, through hard experience, that with Storyline you MUST, MUST, MUST save often.  We also, make sure that storyline is shut down when we quit for the day.

I strongly suspect that your audio files are gone.  I fear that you are going to have to do exactly what you do not want to do.

But I'm not an expert.  I'm just relating what we have experienced.