Forum Discussion
Mute background audio on slide/start audio AFTER specific slides/CHANGE audio on different scenes?
I have background music set to play through my 4-scene project. It mostly works, but I have a few issues:
- The background audio starts on the first slide of the first scene and I do not see an option to altogether mute or disable it until after this slide. This slide plays a bumper/"splash" video for the company, which has its own audio accompaniment. While the background audio doesn't play DURING the video, it DOES play for about one second before the video starts, despite there being no time gap prior to the video on the timeline. Is there any way for me to set the background audio to just NOT play at all until after this slide?
2. I'd like to use different background music for my resolution/score scene. I don't readily see how to do this without just adding to the "playlist," which I take to mean would just have it play after the first audio track throughout the WHOLE project. Can I have one audio track play through scenes 1-3, and then a different one play on scene 4?
3 Replies
Hi jveedubs. Background Audio is a great feature, but it does behave differently to any audio or video on your slides, and some of the issues you describe are due to these differences.
When you add Background Audio to a project, it will be one of the first assets to load when your course is opened, and this means it will likely start to play before your visual assets have loaded. This is why you're hearing it for a moment before your (larger) video loads. You could try a trigger to, 'Stop Media [Background Audio] when timeline starts on this slide'.
However, the chances are the Background Audio will still load before this trigger can stop it, so you'll still hear it play just before the video starts.
Personally, I'd recommend adding 1-2 seconds of silence at the start of your audio instead. You can do this very easily in Audacity or similar.
But once the course has opened, a Stop Media or Pause Media trigger is a reliable way to control the Background Audio. In your example, you could add a trigger at the start of the first slide in Scene 4 to stop or pause the Background Audio, and then trigger another audio track to play on that slide. But bear in mind, this new track will only play during that slide, not across Scene 4.
Here's another trick that might help: use tiggers to gradually reduce the Player.BackgroundAudioVolume from 100 to 0, to achieve a more subtle 'fade out' effect at a certain point in your course. You could then trigger a different audio to start once the Player.BackgroundAudioVolume reaches 0. Again, this new audio would be housed in a slide and would not play across a scene.
It's not currently possible to trigger the 'next song' in a playlist, but it's a feature request that many have suggested. I'd like to think this time next year it'll be a standard feature. But, for now, I hope this helps.Thanks! Editing the audio file would be no problem, but it's a looping track so it's not a practical solution here. I'll try the trigger option, though!
Cool. Hope it works. Remember to trigger the Background Audio to play again once your video completes, and then it should loop in the usual way until you trigger it to stop again in Scene 4.
