Forum Discussion
Changing Speed of Audio in Articulate Storyline?
I'm working on creating some Articulate Storyline projects for a class I teach. Our current videos are MUCH less engaging and interactive and are simply the professor in front of a web camera lecturing. One things students LOVE to do is to speed up the audio / presentation of the video. Most students can listen and absorb items much faster than we can talk about them. I have some audio/lecturing slides in Storyline (e.g. when I do a voice-over of a screen capture or talk about the basics of financial statements). I'm wondering if there is anything I can add to the player that would allow students to control the speed of the audio.
Hi, everyone!
I have some great news to share. We just released another update for Storyline 360. In Update 83, we've included important fixes and new features!
One of the new features we've included:
- Unlock new possibilities for text-to-speech audio. Use speech synthesis markup language (SSML) to adjust the speaking rate, modify pronunciation, emphasize words, add pauses, and more.
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 need additional help!
Hi Janet and welcome to Heroes!
There isn't anything I can think of that added to the player would allow the student to speed up the audio/video - the seekbar will allow them to scrub through the audio/video but they'd miss elements of it. The community always amazes me with what they come up with though, so I hope that someone is able to assist you here.
Edit the video in Windows Movie Maker. The 2012 version (and maybe others) allows you to speed videos up. Save and import into Storyline.
Thanks Stacia for sharing that info here!
This issue continues to increase in importance. The learner's ability to increase playback / progress speed in the player is an option we need to see added to Storyline in the near future. Editing the video before publishing (i.e., forcing the user into a specific playback speed) is not sufficient.
Many learners today want to be able to control that audio speed. This is a central issue to the concept of "self-paced" learning -- it's not a trivial matter.
Hi there, Ian. Thanks for your thoughts. Can you share your perspective in a feature request? If you do, tell us a little more about specific use case where learners need to speed up or slow down audio. Is it narration that learners need to speed up? Is the seekbar on the player not a good solution for scrubbing through the timeline?
Thanks again for taking the time to share!
The seekbar is a good way to FIND a specific piece of audio. Its not good if you want to speed up the overall audio itself. To use an analogy - I look at using the seekbar like skipping a track on a CD. But I can't play the music track itself at 2x speed (so everyone sounds like Chipmunks, lol).
I haven't had the chance to see if this will work in Storyline, but can javascript be used for the same purpose as shown here for Captivate? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSgwS7DeMKo
Although this is only a solution for embedded videos and not the module itself. I'd like the player to have playback speed options. That would be an awesome feature.
Has anyone tried adding JavaScript to Storyline to adjust the playback speed??
You could probably use javascript to find the <audio> tag.
//this line of code will return an array of all audio tags on the HTML page
var x = document.getElementsByTagName('audio');In theory, the page probably will only have one tag so your audio should be the first item in the array. You can now assign the audio an id.
//this line of code assigns an ID to the first element in the audio array
x[0].id='testAudio';Now that you have an ID, you can find the audio by ID at anytime and manipulate the playback rate.
//this code speeds up playback to 125% speed
testAudio.playbackRate=1.25;//this code cuts the playback speed to 50%
testAudio.playbackRate=.50;
Has anyone tried the javascript suggestion above? Could someone at articulate explain detail of how and/or if this could work?
Subscribing to see what happens when you try it.
Hi Janet,
The use of custom JavaScript is not something that we support and it's not something I'm very savvy at to be able to share any thoughts of if this would work.
Hopefully someone in the community will be able to chime in and help you out here.
Does anyone know if I can slow down the speech a little? I use the text to speech feature which works well but it's very fast. Thanks.
Hi Ilanna,
It's not something available today, but I’ll be happy to pass your thoughts on to our product team, but you can also feel free to detail them more through a feature request!
