Hey Tom, here is my Audio question

Hi Shirley.  Not Tom, but I enjoy troubleshooting things in Storyline and find myself with quite a bit of time lately 😄.

Let me see if I got this right: You have audio playing on the base layer of your slide. You also have something on that base layer that triggers 1 of 6 layers to appear.  When the learner clicks on that...something...the layer appears and the audio on the base layer is paused (?).  When the learner closes the layer and returns to the base layer, the audio picks back up where it left off.

Is that more or less what's happening?

I built a mock up with six layers and audio and it works as you say you want it to work (assuming I understand what you want).

Here's a video where I explain a couple of things. If you want to share the file we can look at the slide and see if there's something wrong with how it's set up. If it's set up right, then the support team can look at your file and work from there.

Hi Shirley, 

Since you mentioned that the issue is only happening on one specific layer, have you tried recreating this layer to see if this helps? 

If the issue persists, would you be wiling to share a copy of the affected slide with us here so we can take a closer look at what's happening? 

There's a nuance to the way slide layers work. You can read about it here.

• If the layer has an interaction and you leave, then when you return, the layer picks up where you left off. That's why you hear the audio resuming. The layer has the interactive accordion elements.
• The solution is to remove the triggers to play audio and the audio will play automatically on the timeline.
• Set the layer properties to Reset to Initial state when revisiting. 

Thank you so much for your help. 

You're welcome

I've been struggling with this same issue for a number of hours. I've got a project with seven layers - each layer has some text and a button to play an audio clip. We need the users to play the audio after they've read the text, so having it play automatically when the layer loads is not an option.  I've got my layers all set up so they reset to initial state, and I tried adding a trigger to the layer, and then to the audio button, to jump to 0 seconds on the timeline... nothing has worked so far. 

The only solution I've managed to come up with is to completely rebuild everything on one layer, using triggers to hide/show text objects and audio buttons. By doing this, the "jump to 0 seconds" trigger actually works, but wow - the programming is exponentially more complex.  

@Brian if they need to read the text first, then play audio, I'd have some sort of validation of reading, maybe a button. 

I put together a tutorial with a couple of ways you could do it.

Thank you Tom!  This all makes sense. I do have each layer set up with text and a button to trigger playing of the audio clip. It's the "reset to initial state" that's not working.  My client's asked that if a user closes the layer part way through the audio clip, then comes back to it, the audio restarts instead of continuing from where they closed it. "Reset to initial state" is not working for the audio clip.  I'm currently working with the timeline to see if I can engineer this another way.

I managed to get the functionality I wanted, but because I couldn't rely on "reset to initial state," I had to engineer all of the action on the timeline. 

For each layer:

1. I removed the audio and re-inserted it directly to the timeline, not tied to any object triggers, and placed it at 1 second on the timeline. 

2. I added a slide trigger to pause the timeline at 0.5 seconds.

3. I attached two triggers to the "play audio" button - one to jump to 1 second on the timeline, and another to resume the timeline. 

Thus, when a user opens a layer, they see the text and a play button. The play button resumes the timeline and the audio is heard. If they close the layer and come back to it, the timeline pauses at 0.5s. They click the button and the timeline resumes.  Pretty simple, but the solution sure escaped me for a while...